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Visual programming works great when it all ends up in a set scene, a stable form that you just want to use code to create. Once the task is to loop over time a

Visual programming works great when it all ends up in a set scene, a stable form that you just want to use code to create. Once the task is to loop over time and do a bunch of processing, all the visual tools break down. They are two separate categories, two separate functions that shouldn't really be treated by the same tool just because they both use 'code'.

smoe 6y ago
Don't think it is that simple. For example the visual programming languages for music and multimedia Max/MSP and Pure Data. While you could use them to create a stable form, they are in my opinion much more useful and interesting for rapid prototyping, live coding, create or connect interactive systems, etc. Sure, they are a bit niche, but certainly don't break down as soon as you loop over time and do a bunch of processing.
- friendlybus 6y ago
  I had a quick look at Max and PD. I see what you mean, you can constantly run those programs, produce new outputs and edit it on the fly. My meaning is more narrow I guess. Desktop apps and video games are built to run themselves post delivery. Music/film/3d models/textures end up as arranged bytes that are used as content for the apps and games to display. I guess textual programming languages work best when building the hierarchies and branches of loops that runtime apps have to self-navigate. Visual programming languages work well at symbolically representing many many many different rabbit holes one can draw from to produce an arranged set of bytes. The visual stuff breaks down when you have to bake in navigating hierarchy after the product is out of your hands. The text stuff sucks at building 3d models vert-by-vert or with pattern matching. I haven't thought it all the way through.
  - smoe 6y ago
    I think we agree. As a wrote in another comment, where visual programming shines in my opinion is as a way to interact with an underlying complex system. An alternative to scripting languages. To take the Max example further. Ableton Live integrated it deeply into their digital audio workstation. Although Ableton itself, not even talking about all the third party plugins, provides enough tools to make music with for a life time, having Max integrated opened up a whole new world of exploration beyond what the UIs created by the host and plugin vendors offer and it allowed non technical people to create and share their own extensions to a software. I think even for trained programmers there is maybe more potential for visual programming. Maybe not for the core software we are writing, but to at the same time interact with and visualize the software and the ecosystem. I sometimes feel we are a bit stuck to have to either use cli and textual tools or graphical tools with limited and vendor specific UI. I don't know how this would look like, since I'm a person that almost always defaults to cli and textual tools, because I know I can get the job done with them. But having used visual programming quite a bit outside of work, I'm intrigued to give it more attention to.
pzone 6y ago
Visual for-loops work just fine for iterating over geometry chunks, and can even be parallelized with "compile block begin" nodes in Houdini. High-level iteration is less intuitive, eg. iterating over random seeds for a sim and rendering preview animations, but the process is still easier than switching the entire thing to text input. The toolkit for this is called PDG or TOP networks.

smoe 6y ago

Don't think it is that simple. For example the visual programming languages for music and multimedia Max/MSP and Pure Data. While you could use them to create a stable form, they are in my opinion much more useful and interesting for rapid prototyping, live coding, create or connect interactive systems, etc. Sure, they are a bit niche, but certainly don't break down as soon as you loop over time and do a bunch of processing.

friendlybus 6y ago
I had a quick look at Max and PD. I see what you mean, you can constantly run those programs, produce new outputs and edit it on the fly. My meaning is more narrow I guess. Desktop apps and video games are built to run themselves post delivery. Music/film/3d models/textures end up as arranged bytes that are used as content for the apps and games to display. I guess textual programming languages work best when building the hierarchies and branches of loops that runtime apps have to self-navigate. Visual programming languages work well at symbolically representing many many many different rabbit holes one can draw from to produce an arranged set of bytes. The visual stuff breaks down when you have to bake in navigating hierarchy after the product is out of your hands. The text stuff sucks at building 3d models vert-by-vert or with pattern matching. I haven't thought it all the way through.
- smoe 6y ago
  I think we agree. As a wrote in another comment, where visual programming shines in my opinion is as a way to interact with an underlying complex system. An alternative to scripting languages. To take the Max example further. Ableton Live integrated it deeply into their digital audio workstation. Although Ableton itself, not even talking about all the third party plugins, provides enough tools to make music with for a life time, having Max integrated opened up a whole new world of exploration beyond what the UIs created by the host and plugin vendors offer and it allowed non technical people to create and share their own extensions to a software. I think even for trained programmers there is maybe more potential for visual programming. Maybe not for the core software we are writing, but to at the same time interact with and visualize the software and the ecosystem. I sometimes feel we are a bit stuck to have to either use cli and textual tools or graphical tools with limited and vendor specific UI. I don't know how this would look like, since I'm a person that almost always defaults to cli and textual tools, because I know I can get the job done with them. But having used visual programming quite a bit outside of work, I'm intrigued to give it more attention to.

pzone 6y ago

Visual for-loops work just fine for iterating over geometry chunks, and can even be parallelized with "compile block begin" nodes in Houdini. High-level iteration is less intuitive, eg. iterating over random seeds for a sim and rendering preview animations, but the process is still easier than switching the entire thing to text input. The toolkit for this is called PDG or TOP networks.