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Yes it does suck. Not for writing but for maintenance. I once got dumped a BI project that was written in a visual tool. Simple things like tracing how a field
by mark-r 8y ago
Yes it does suck. Not for writing but for maintenance.
I once got dumped a BI project that was written in a visual tool. Simple things like tracing how a field was derived was impossible, because there was no search function. I could search the XML file it produced but that was impenetrable.
- wires 8y agoYeah, I feel you, been there myself. but this is mainly because those BI tools themselves and the graphical languages they use have issues. when done properly, diagrams can be searched similarly to Haskell's hoogle, Purescript's pursuit, etc... in addition you could specify a template diagram it should match
- mathgenius 8y agoThe canonical example of this phenomenon is the spreadsheet. Otoh, it does often lead to job security.
- mark-r 8y agoTrue that. I saw a factory whose production schedule was maintained in an Excel spreadsheet - the consultant who put together and maintained that spreadsheet made more than the plant manager.
- ken 8y agoIt sounds like you're judging all of visual programming based on one project, written in one language. You don't even say what language it was. Am I allowed to condemn all textual programming based on the last textual program a company asked me to maintain? It had a single function over 1500 lines long, which took over a dozen parameters, had well over a dozen exit points, re-used variable names and values (sometimes unintentionally) between otherwise independent sections, and had zero documentation. And I had to fix a bug in it. "Impenetrable" does not begin to describe it. Text-based programming is a disaster.
- svenhof 8y agoI felt actual discomfort reading your anecdote.
- mark-r 8y agoI don't say because I don't remember. It was about 10 years ago and I've pushed it completely out of my mind. I do remember it was a Microsoft product. I never want to see it again, and due to a job change between then and now I doubt that I ever will. Maybe you're right that it's unfair for me to dismiss the paradigm as a whole based on one bad experience. But it just seems to me that the mindset lends itself to a write-only environment.
- IshKebab 8y agoThat is how it is in every visual language though. It's too much hassle to add comments, so nobody does, and it's too hard to organise things nicely, so nobody does that either. You end up with literal spaghetti code. https://www.google.com/search?q=labview+spaghetti+code https://www.google.com/search?q=labview+spaghetti+code Yes you can make horrible code in text too, but it is a lot easier to not do that.