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"Visual programming tools are as old as computer monitors." That's an interesting statement. I always assumed they were much older -- and that the current det

by ken 7y ago

"Visual programming tools are as old as computer monitors." That's an interesting statement. I always assumed they were much older -- and that the current detour into 'lines of ASCII text' were a mere implementation detail, driven by historical accident. This[1] sure looks like a simple dataflow program to me, even if Gauss never intended it to be implemented on a von Neumann machine. I hate writing programs as text, but unfortunately, "text is the universal interface" right now. It's easy to save, and diff and patch, and edit. There isn't a general-purpose format for saving graphs, diffing/patching them, or a decent selection of editors for them. In 50 years, I'm sure we'll look back on today's programming the same way we now look back on the pre-visual-editor era. You had the technology to create general-purpose graph editors, but you didn't have or use any? Why not? [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooley–Tukey_FFT_algorithm#/media/File:DIT-FFT-butterfly.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooley–Tukey_FFT_algorithm#/me...

jmiskovic 7y ago
No arguments here. We should move away from text into more visual domain, but we lack a polished editing tool. Every visual programming language brings own tools, incompatible with each other and lacking basic features. Here's my wishlist: completely keyboard-driven; automatic graph layout; constraint editing to tree/DAG/full graph; don't allow connecting incompatible types; declutter by showing only N neighbours from current node; support for extensions to integrate different programming languages. Sure it's a tall order, but this is the building platform for future of computing :) Since this thread is about Nodes, I'll try to give some constructive criticism. Seems like too much manual work is needed to organize the code on screen. Non-trivial programs become entangled because of 2D plane constraint. It's somewhat unjustified criticism though, since text programs also require lot of manual arranging ("architecture") and easily become hard to read. I like the built-in visualization of processed data. Cool stuff.
- marcinignac 7y ago
  They beauty of Nodes is that we are not limited by layout or connections. We have successfully used redux for centralised state management with change triggers distributed down the graph.
jacobolus 7y ago
As far as I can tell Gauss didn’t ever make a picture like that ...?

by ken 7y ago

jmiskovic 7y ago

No arguments here. We should move away from text into more visual domain, but we lack a polished editing tool. Every visual programming language brings own tools, incompatible with each other and lacking basic features. Here's my wishlist: completely keyboard-driven; automatic graph layout; constraint editing to tree/DAG/full graph; don't allow connecting incompatible types; declutter by showing only N neighbours from current node; support for extensions to integrate different programming languages. Sure it's a tall order, but this is the building platform for future of computing :) Since this thread is about Nodes, I'll try to give some constructive criticism. Seems like too much manual work is needed to organize the code on screen. Non-trivial programs become entangled because of 2D plane constraint. It's somewhat unjustified criticism though, since text programs also require lot of manual arranging ("architecture") and easily become hard to read. I like the built-in visualization of processed data. Cool stuff.

marcinignac 7y ago
They beauty of Nodes is that we are not limited by layout or connections. We have successfully used redux for centralised state management with change triggers distributed down the graph.

jacobolus 7y ago

As far as I can tell Gauss didn’t ever make a picture like that ...?