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My guess is that in the majority of areas of programming the work is to express rules, and here text is simply more powerful. Are laws written using graphics? V

My guess is that in the majority of areas of programming the work is to express rules, and here text is simply more powerful. Are laws written using graphics? Visual programming can be useful for workflow (3D, movies or music DAWs). But otherwise for expressing rules (which is a good part of programming) visual is too limiting.

jrockway 6y ago
Personally I hate visual editors for CAD, 3D, etc., and I think they are inefficient. People are scared of programming, so people go out of their way to build complicated UIs for them, which are much harder than programming. But, at least there's no text to type! (Look at professional video editors, that try to make video editing like programming by hooking up two keyboards to their computer and using one of them to execute AutoHotKey macros in their video editor.) I often want to describe some sort of exact operation based upon exact numbers, and code is a good way of doing this. Obviously, providing input to the computer in program form does not preclude real-time display, and this is essential for things like 3D modelling. You wouldn't just "sketch" an object in your text editor with no visual reference. Fortunately, a lot of tools cater to that use case -- Blender lets you define scenes and animations as Python code (and when you mouse over something in the UI it tells you the Python function that implements that button!), and there are some CAD packages that let you describe your object as a computer program. (Unfortunately, I tried these and didn't like them. I do like Fusion 360's sketch-and-extrude model, but didn't like OpenSCAD's model. What I want to do is draw the rough shape of something to get a template, then turn that into code that I can edit to put in exact constraints and dimensions.) I am also looking for a text-based schematic capture application if anyone has any suggestions. I would much prefer typing the names of the edges of my netlist graph to pointing and clicking them.
- rjsw 6y ago
  I'm currently looking at a hybrid approach, using Blockly to define operations visually that you want to perform on CAD data.
- zenhack 6y ago
  Yeah, I think there's a lot of potential in hybrid models like this. You actually do see these things out in the wild -- GUI builders come to mind -- but they're not a replacement for a proper programming language. As it turns out, the written word has some genuine advantages over other media? But on that point, the wall of text you see in published prose is an artifact of the printing press -- prior to that it was unusual to have long texts that didn't include little sketches, diagrams, illustrations...

jrockway 6y ago

Personally I hate visual editors for CAD, 3D, etc., and I think they are inefficient. People are scared of programming, so people go out of their way to build complicated UIs for them, which are much harder than programming. But, at least there's no text to type! (Look at professional video editors, that try to make video editing like programming by hooking up two keyboards to their computer and using one of them to execute AutoHotKey macros in their video editor.) I often want to describe some sort of exact operation based upon exact numbers, and code is a good way of doing this. Obviously, providing input to the computer in program form does not preclude real-time display, and this is essential for things like 3D modelling. You wouldn't just "sketch" an object in your text editor with no visual reference. Fortunately, a lot of tools cater to that use case -- Blender lets you define scenes and animations as Python code (and when you mouse over something in the UI it tells you the Python function that implements that button!), and there are some CAD packages that let you describe your object as a computer program. (Unfortunately, I tried these and didn't like them. I do like Fusion 360's sketch-and-extrude model, but didn't like OpenSCAD's model. What I want to do is draw the rough shape of something to get a template, then turn that into code that I can edit to put in exact constraints and dimensions.) I am also looking for a text-based schematic capture application if anyone has any suggestions. I would much prefer typing the names of the edges of my netlist graph to pointing and clicking them.

rjsw 6y ago
I'm currently looking at a hybrid approach, using Blockly to define operations visually that you want to perform on CAD data.
zenhack 6y ago
Yeah, I think there's a lot of potential in hybrid models like this. You actually do see these things out in the wild -- GUI builders come to mind -- but they're not a replacement for a proper programming language. As it turns out, the written word has some genuine advantages over other media? But on that point, the wall of text you see in published prose is an artifact of the printing press -- prior to that it was unusual to have long texts that didn't include little sketches, diagrams, illustrations...