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> Unfortunately, visual languages tend to be quite poor at abstraction It's not as simple as that. Visual languages tend to be very good at portraying a fairly
by zozbot123 8y ago
> Unfortunately, visual languages tend to be quite poor at abstraction
It's not as simple as that. Visual languages tend to be very good at portraying a fairly large subset of abstractions - loosely speaking, many and perhaps most abstractions that you'd want to model using category theory are almost inherently "visual" - and just not very helpful at portraying others. I think the answer is a tighter integration of textual and visual "modes" on the same codebase, rather than just using visual for everything no matter what.
- TuringTest 8y agoYes, I would expect that. Algebra expressions are best written with infix operators, rather than graphs. And data or control flows benefit from the boxes-and-arrows representation of visual languages. The problem is, how to decide what parts of the program ti represent as text, which ones are better as graphs, and where to place program data values?