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What I find interesting is that the human society and economy at large is able to function without there being any genius programmer who designed it all. If you

What I find interesting is that the human society and economy at large is able to function without there being any genius programmer who designed it all. If you look at roads, there is a road everywhere and still people don't get lost. But in a big chunk of source-code I do feel I get lost. I believe that may be because there are too few constraints when programming textually. Whereas when designing roads and bridges we have the constraints of physical space. It is possible to draw a 2-dimensional map of all the roads and thus easily understand it all. I think visual programming was inspired by this notion, how physical and geometrical constraints make things simpler because we know those constraints intuitively, which thus helps us reason about the structure of the whole thing. It can not violate physics, nor geometry. Textual programs can, do anything their syntax allows. That makes their full structure hard to understand

hermitcrab 5y ago
Habe you seen an aerial view of Birmingham's "spaghetti junction"? ;0)
username90 5y ago
A city with streets is just a graph with 1-4 pointers per node. It is super simple in code, just a few lines, not sure how you could get lost in that. If you make code anything more complex than that then it isn't really equivalent to navigating the streets on a map. > I believe that may be because there are too few constraints when programming textually No that is not the issue, you can write extremely complex and useful programs in just 100 lines of code and you can translate those to visual programming easily with no improvement in comprehension. Code just takes long to read since it is so powerful.
- galaxyLogic 5y ago
  > If you make code anything more complex than that then it isn't really equivalent to navigating the streets on a map. My point is, you should strive to make coding not more complex than that, if possible. And if you have constraints such as must represent the program as a 2-D dataflow structure then it must stay simple as that. Now is there a need to make more complicated programs? Probably yes. But human society is still able to function with the simple dataflows that it has, which makes it understandable and thus very resilient.

hermitcrab 5y ago

Habe you seen an aerial view of Birmingham's "spaghetti junction"? ;0)

username90 5y ago

A city with streets is just a graph with 1-4 pointers per node. It is super simple in code, just a few lines, not sure how you could get lost in that. If you make code anything more complex than that then it isn't really equivalent to navigating the streets on a map. > I believe that may be because there are too few constraints when programming textually No that is not the issue, you can write extremely complex and useful programs in just 100 lines of code and you can translate those to visual programming easily with no improvement in comprehension. Code just takes long to read since it is so powerful.

galaxyLogic 5y ago
> If you make code anything more complex than that then it isn't really equivalent to navigating the streets on a map. My point is, you should strive to make coding not more complex than that, if possible. And if you have constraints such as must represent the program as a 2-D dataflow structure then it must stay simple as that. Now is there a need to make more complicated programs? Probably yes. But human society is still able to function with the simple dataflows that it has, which makes it understandable and thus very resilient.