39 ms·
It would probably look a lot like Excel. Most people I work with who are non-programmers but who could benefit from coding spend a lot of their working life in
by danpalmer 5y ago
It would probably look a lot like Excel.
Most people I work with who are non-programmers but who could benefit from coding spend a lot of their working life in Excel. When we teach them SQL and give them access to our data warehouse, a lot of the time the explanations that stick are thinking of it like a big spreadsheet with lots of pages and columns/rows. Spreadsheets are fundamentally very visual, and have few abstractions to get your head around before you can start work. (There have been "visual programming languages", but these often look like graph editors and I think that's a complex enough abstraction that it complicates the process).
From this we've then seen a whole load of tools that are trying to be "smarter" spreadsheets. Things like Airtable. Is it a spreadsheet? Is it a database? Is it a no-code application? Is it a project management system? Is it a calendar? Well, yes. Retool, and others also fit into this. They all have a lot of spreadsheet like functionality.
- bellyfullofbac 5y agoYou mentioning visual languages makes me think of DRAKON, which was good enough for the Russian copy of the space shuttle project: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DRAKON https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DRAKON
- danpalmer 5y agoWow never knew that! Very interesting. I don't know of many visual programming languages like this that have production uses. I've seen things like node based editing in Quartz Composer, various game engines, 3D modelling software, etc, but it's almost always only really for pipelines of graphical values rather than truly general purpose programming (even if they might be Turing complete).
- sterlind 5y agoI tried unsuccessfully to sell my team on DRAKON when we were consolidating workflow engines/schemas. It seems really neat.