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I wish people would stop claiming that drag and drop program creation is not programming. It is simply a different style of programming using a different langu

I wish people would stop claiming that drag and drop program creation is not programming. It is simply a different style of programming using a different language. From Wikipedia: "Computer programming is the process of designing and building an executable computer program to accomplish a specific computing result or to perform a specific task." See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_programming https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_programming. The same claims used to be made regarding Programmable Logic Controllers (PLCs), despite the word programming being part of the name.

munro 5y ago
Outside of tech, I think coding means green text on a black background--but I think of it more generally, describing a process that you want something/someone else to run... a cooking recipe for someone to follow, it's CODE! So yeah, to that end, visual programming is still coding. AI that generates code, well, you still have to tell the AI what to do, still coding--on that tangent, if AI code generation ever is perfected, I'd rather work in that language, and not even look at the output like assembly. I really want visual programming to succeed, but there's something fundamentally harder with it. I'm starting to think written language can't be beat for expressing thought. Visual programming is probably a great introduction to computer programming for people to quickly automate simple tasks, but I rest assured that as soon as they want to describe any complex process, they're going to fall into written language like the rest of us--or do lots of copying and pasting and create a mess. To write is to think, I think.
- kibbleble 5y ago
  There's a time and place for visuals. Geometry is a form of visual math, but how do you "visualize" models that go beyond the 3rd dimension...? For most people, trigonometry is enough to build stuff with. And for many ideas, a diagram communicates better than talking or writing it into an excel sheet.
zwieback 5y ago
I don't really care if it's called programming or not but whenever I've inherited LabView or similar type of project I spent more time trying to figure out what the "programmer" tried to do than it would take to rewrite from scratch in a traditional language/environment.
- sokoloff 5y ago
  If you gave them a program written in C++, it would probably be faster for them to recreate it in Labview than to figure your version out. (Heck, if you gave it to a python programmer, they might choose to replace-implement it in python rather than figure out your C++.)

munro 5y ago

Outside of tech, I think coding means green text on a black background--but I think of it more generally, describing a process that you want something/someone else to run... a cooking recipe for someone to follow, it's CODE! So yeah, to that end, visual programming is still coding. AI that generates code, well, you still have to tell the AI what to do, still coding--on that tangent, if AI code generation ever is perfected, I'd rather work in that language, and not even look at the output like assembly. I really want visual programming to succeed, but there's something fundamentally harder with it. I'm starting to think written language can't be beat for expressing thought. Visual programming is probably a great introduction to computer programming for people to quickly automate simple tasks, but I rest assured that as soon as they want to describe any complex process, they're going to fall into written language like the rest of us--or do lots of copying and pasting and create a mess. To write is to think, I think.

kibbleble 5y ago
There's a time and place for visuals. Geometry is a form of visual math, but how do you "visualize" models that go beyond the 3rd dimension...? For most people, trigonometry is enough to build stuff with. And for many ideas, a diagram communicates better than talking or writing it into an excel sheet.

zwieback 5y ago

I don't really care if it's called programming or not but whenever I've inherited LabView or similar type of project I spent more time trying to figure out what the "programmer" tried to do than it would take to rewrite from scratch in a traditional language/environment.

sokoloff 5y ago
If you gave them a program written in C++, it would probably be faster for them to recreate it in Labview than to figure your version out. (Heck, if you gave it to a python programmer, they might choose to replace-implement it in python rather than figure out your C++.)