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Code as text had long bothered me because of my experience with various schematic capture and pcb layout tools. With those the design is stored in form that can

Code as text had long bothered me because of my experience with various schematic capture and pcb layout tools. With those the design is stored in form that can be queried directly. And you can change object properties programmatically. I feel like the insistence of text based programming languages just leaves the industry completely mired in the mid 1970's.

treeman79 6y ago
I’ve had to deal with several graphical programming languages over the years. They only work on the most basic of use cases. The moment you want to get real work done they just get in the way.
- jtwaleson 6y ago
  Very much disagree, and completely dependent on what you define as "real work". There are many low-cost platforms out there that allow for very rapid development of big projects. Disclaimer: I used to work for one of them (Mendix)
  - treeman79 6y ago
    Looks like a modern Visual Basic 6. Neat. VB6 was so horrible and productive at the same time. Single person could build an app in days that a team of 10 would struggle with today. And a group of 10 could bring said app to a stretching halt. So many memories, good and bad.
    - jtwaleson 6y ago
      Indeed :) I'd say the biggest problems with platforms like these are 1: meaningfully diffing (visual diffing is an unsolved problem) and 2: the enterprise pricing.
      - treeman79 6y ago
        Lock in as well. Was at a company that invented a visual programming tool and forced development to use it. Several flat out refused. We all went on with our careers. The people that used the proprietary system still work there, not then a decade later. They hated the tool then. But they have no marketable skills set at this point.
- Gibbon1 6y ago
  You completely misunderstood my comment. Edit: Stay classy HN
jtwaleson 6y ago
It puzzles me too. I think that portability and the ability to use the same text-based tools even though you use different languages are the best reasons for sticking with text.
- Gibbon1 6y ago
  I think is a feeling of loss of control and having no clue what you're missing. Programs stored as unstructured text make it difficult to produce good tooling. Makes programmatic code gen hard, makes diffing hard, make automatically generating commit message impossible. Refactoring is always problematic. Merging even more so. But it seems though even mentioning that perhaps structured data is a better way to store code makes most programmers really angry. At least that's my experience.

treeman79 6y ago

I’ve had to deal with several graphical programming languages over the years. They only work on the most basic of use cases. The moment you want to get real work done they just get in the way.

jtwaleson 6y ago
Very much disagree, and completely dependent on what you define as "real work". There are many low-cost platforms out there that allow for very rapid development of big projects. Disclaimer: I used to work for one of them (Mendix)
- treeman79 6y ago
  Looks like a modern Visual Basic 6. Neat. VB6 was so horrible and productive at the same time. Single person could build an app in days that a team of 10 would struggle with today. And a group of 10 could bring said app to a stretching halt. So many memories, good and bad.
  - jtwaleson 6y ago
    Indeed :) I'd say the biggest problems with platforms like these are 1: meaningfully diffing (visual diffing is an unsolved problem) and 2: the enterprise pricing.
    - treeman79 6y ago
      Lock in as well. Was at a company that invented a visual programming tool and forced development to use it. Several flat out refused. We all went on with our careers. The people that used the proprietary system still work there, not then a decade later. They hated the tool then. But they have no marketable skills set at this point.
Gibbon1 6y ago
You completely misunderstood my comment. Edit: Stay classy HN

jtwaleson 6y ago

It puzzles me too. I think that portability and the ability to use the same text-based tools even though you use different languages are the best reasons for sticking with text.

Gibbon1 6y ago
I think is a feeling of loss of control and having no clue what you're missing. Programs stored as unstructured text make it difficult to produce good tooling. Makes programmatic code gen hard, makes diffing hard, make automatically generating commit message impossible. Refactoring is always problematic. Merging even more so. But it seems though even mentioning that perhaps structured data is a better way to store code makes most programmers really angry. At least that's my experience.