4 ms·

I have not seen any solution for tracking changes, differences,displaying versions, etc. I.E. git for pictures. Some visual languages can turn an area into a 's

by RNeff 6y ago

I have not seen any solution for tracking changes, differences,displaying versions, etc. I.E. git for pictures. Some visual languages can turn an area into a 'subroutine', I have not seen any solution to build libraries of reusable 'subroutines'. I used to draw flowcharts on size D (22.0 x 34.0 in) and size E (34.0 x 44.0 in) sheets of paper. I wish I had a monitor of either of those sizes. Visual programming works very well for data flow problems.

bmitc 6y ago
> I have not seen any solution for tracking changes, differences,displaying versions, etc. I.E. git for pictures. LabVIEW has a diff capability, and while working for National Instruments, my team actually had a quite capable custom code-review system built out of this diff. This is an area that is brought up often, but text-based diff tools weren't magically found in the universe. They were built, and some of them are good and some of them not. It's not a paradigm's fault that tools like git were built around the idea that code must be text. I do agree that better tools need to exist though, but there isn't a reason for why they can't. They just need to be built. There are hard and interesting problems in that space, both technically and design-wise. > Some visual languages can turn an area into a 'subroutine', I have not seen any solution to build libraries of reusable 'subroutines'. LabVIEW has a third-party developed package manager in the JKI VIPM. And LabVIEW has features where you can put your VIs and classes into various LabVIEW specific containers, most usually source libraries, that can then be referenced and re-used in projects. Just treat the libraries as modules like you would in any other language. They should contain classes and functions that have a shared or particular purpose.
- steerablesafe 6y ago
  > It's not a paradigm's fault that tools like git were built around the idea that code must be text. FWIW you can have custom diff and merge drivers in git. One could probably hook up LabVIEW's diff tool as a git diff driver, I don't know about merge.
  - bmitc 6y ago
    Yes, but it isn't easy. Some people have done so, and I should probably revisit it myself since I know use GitHub in my later jobs and not Perforce. I mentioned this in another comment, but we had some tools integrated into Perforce's workflow to do diffs. Merge is harder in LabVIEW and isn't where it should be. However, that doesn't mean it can't exist.

by RNeff 6y ago

bmitc 6y ago

> I have not seen any solution for tracking changes, differences,displaying versions, etc. I.E. git for pictures. LabVIEW has a diff capability, and while working for National Instruments, my team actually had a quite capable custom code-review system built out of this diff. This is an area that is brought up often, but text-based diff tools weren't magically found in the universe. They were built, and some of them are good and some of them not. It's not a paradigm's fault that tools like git were built around the idea that code must be text. I do agree that better tools need to exist though, but there isn't a reason for why they can't. They just need to be built. There are hard and interesting problems in that space, both technically and design-wise. > Some visual languages can turn an area into a 'subroutine', I have not seen any solution to build libraries of reusable 'subroutines'. LabVIEW has a third-party developed package manager in the JKI VIPM. And LabVIEW has features where you can put your VIs and classes into various LabVIEW specific containers, most usually source libraries, that can then be referenced and re-used in projects. Just treat the libraries as modules like you would in any other language. They should contain classes and functions that have a shared or particular purpose.

steerablesafe 6y ago
> It's not a paradigm's fault that tools like git were built around the idea that code must be text. FWIW you can have custom diff and merge drivers in git. One could probably hook up LabVIEW's diff tool as a git diff driver, I don't know about merge.
- bmitc 6y ago
  Yes, but it isn't easy. Some people have done so, and I should probably revisit it myself since I know use GitHub in my later jobs and not Perforce. I mentioned this in another comment, but we had some tools integrated into Perforce's workflow to do diffs. Merge is harder in LabVIEW and isn't where it should be. However, that doesn't mean it can't exist.