4 ms·

what isn't accurate? there has been extremely little research done in the way of visual programming in comparison to text-based programming. > Visual programmi

what isn't accurate? there has been extremely little research done in the way of visual programming in comparison to text-based programming. > Visual programming hasn't taken off because it isn't as good as text for the majority of use cases. This is borne out by more than 50 years of people writing computer programs. ...writing computer programs with text. this bias is massive because nearly no one writes visual programs. a lot of that is due to availability of visual environments, some of which are quite expensive (e.g., labview). most of it is due to bias. if every single computer science and computer engineering major starts of their education with being taught "this (i.e., text) is how you program and interact with computers" then that sets up a massive bias that is nigh impossible to overcome. any study that does not address this bias is flawed. hence, we have people, who have never even programmed in a visual language, proclaiming visual programming doesn't work. i constantly hear text-based programmers say "oh, visual programming is good for niche things or trivial examples, but it doesn't scale", but yet i have developed large, complex applications with visual programming environments. you know why? because i treat it as real software. i modularize. i take data abstraction seriously. i accept the dataflow paradigm as the key paradigm and build things off of that. and that leads me to another point. the dataflow paradigm does not map well to text-based languages at all, but it is a very powerful paradigm. visual programming languages are very good at the dataflow paradigm, and so from that alone, they seem to be required if we are to efficiently program dataflow-based systems.

mimixco 8y ago
Scratch, the MIT visual programming environment is free. How complex of an app would you like to write with that? Visual programming is inefficient in its use of screen or paper real estate. How many screens full of Scratch would it take to represent a complex program? Too many to realistically read or scan. Here again, visual programming is not new. If there were some great advantage in it, it would be more widely adopted. This is a solution in search of a problem.
- nikofeyn 8y ago
  i completely dismiss scratch as an actual visual programming environment. i honestly don't think of it as visual programming at all because it simply takes a text-based language and replaces the syntax with blocks rather than spaces, semi-colons, brackets, etc. i personally feel it is misguided. dynamicland is more of a visual programming environment than scratch is. so here, you are taking what amounts to a toy and something directly marketed towards children as your shining example of a visual programming language. in my opinion, labview is the most complex, general-purpose visual programming environment, and people have clearly written rather large, complex applications with it. why isn't it adopted more? a lot of reasons, one of the biggest ones being cost. the other the association with a particular domain, but i consider it a general-purpose language. even if one gets passed that, there is still a huge bias that text is still THE way to program and interact with computers.
  - zozbot123 8y ago
    "Scratch" is simply a visual representation of structural editing, with the well-known advantages and drawbacks of the latter. Whether you think of that as "visual programming" is up to you, but the general use case should not be dismissed.
  - wires 8y ago
    > i completely dismiss scratch as an actual visual programming environment. well put, couldn't agree more, I often use scratch as an anti example of diagrammatic programming. visual programming has this topological aspect to it (move a box around and don't change the program), and it demands compatibility with this from the underlying thing, whatever it is, state machines or stream processing functions or whatever. labview is a great example of a practical use of it, which some relatively minor, but critical modifications you can use it for so many more applications... maybe one day statebox can fill that gap, but we have a lot to do still
  - dkersten 8y ago
    I agree completely. Scratch is a snap-together UI for traditional code. Just because the programming text is embedded inside draggable blocks doesn't make it a visual language, its a different UI for a text editor. Sure, its visual, but it doesn't actually change the language at all in any way. It could be just as easily represented as text, the semantics are the same. Its a more beginner-friendly mouse-centric IDE basically.

mimixco 8y ago

Scratch, the MIT visual programming environment is free. How complex of an app would you like to write with that? Visual programming is inefficient in its use of screen or paper real estate. How many screens full of Scratch would it take to represent a complex program? Too many to realistically read or scan. Here again, visual programming is not new. If there were some great advantage in it, it would be more widely adopted. This is a solution in search of a problem.

nikofeyn 8y ago
i completely dismiss scratch as an actual visual programming environment. i honestly don't think of it as visual programming at all because it simply takes a text-based language and replaces the syntax with blocks rather than spaces, semi-colons, brackets, etc. i personally feel it is misguided. dynamicland is more of a visual programming environment than scratch is. so here, you are taking what amounts to a toy and something directly marketed towards children as your shining example of a visual programming language. in my opinion, labview is the most complex, general-purpose visual programming environment, and people have clearly written rather large, complex applications with it. why isn't it adopted more? a lot of reasons, one of the biggest ones being cost. the other the association with a particular domain, but i consider it a general-purpose language. even if one gets passed that, there is still a huge bias that text is still THE way to program and interact with computers.
- zozbot123 8y ago
  "Scratch" is simply a visual representation of structural editing, with the well-known advantages and drawbacks of the latter. Whether you think of that as "visual programming" is up to you, but the general use case should not be dismissed.
- wires 8y ago
  > i completely dismiss scratch as an actual visual programming environment. well put, couldn't agree more, I often use scratch as an anti example of diagrammatic programming. visual programming has this topological aspect to it (move a box around and don't change the program), and it demands compatibility with this from the underlying thing, whatever it is, state machines or stream processing functions or whatever. labview is a great example of a practical use of it, which some relatively minor, but critical modifications you can use it for so many more applications... maybe one day statebox can fill that gap, but we have a lot to do still
- dkersten 8y ago
  I agree completely. Scratch is a snap-together UI for traditional code. Just because the programming text is embedded inside draggable blocks doesn't make it a visual language, its a different UI for a text editor. Sure, its visual, but it doesn't actually change the language at all in any way. It could be just as easily represented as text, the semantics are the same. Its a more beginner-friendly mouse-centric IDE basically.