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"Flow-based" is only one kind of visual programming. UML alone has over a dozen different kinds of standardized diagrams. I can write a state machine with a b
by ken 6y ago
"Flow-based" is only one kind of visual programming. UML alone has over a dozen different kinds of standardized diagrams. I can write a state machine with a big switch statement, for example, but I still find them easier to read when presented visually.
Maybe we just haven't figured out good visualization types yet for some kinds of programs we write. Interestingly, the opposite is not true. I have yet to see a case where we had a half-decent visualization, and people still said "This would be easier to understand if it were 1000 lines of C++".
- hermitcrab 6y agoI think a visual approach is great for representing the overall structure of a C++ program (e.g. inheritance hierarchy), but I much prefer code for the lower level logic. People have been using visual representations of programs for ~70 years. I'm not sure how much room there is for major improvements to visualization.
- ken 6y agoBack in the 1980's, I heard virtually the same argument -- just replace "C++" and "visualization" with "assembly language" and "compilers". There turned out to be lots of room for improvements at the top! We could put almost all of the old housekeeping and busywork into our tools, and use a much simpler language for describing the unique parts of our program that we actually care about. I see no evidence that our current style of object-oriented programming is going to turn out to be the pinnacle of computing abstraction. The median language is (slowly but steadily) climbing the abstraction ladder, and each step brings it closer to an abstract visualization.