5 ms·

Why not go all the way and create a graphical programming environment? I've felt that this is long overdue.

• mamp 15y ago
  This was a popular trend in the 90s e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prograph http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prograph Check out the Mactech articles in the references. I even wrote a decent size app in prograph. While I really liked it a large code base was really hard to navigate and maintain. Also you couldn't email code snippets around easily.
• satiani 15y ago
  The problem with graphical programming is that it is inefficient when it comes to using a large API. There are only so many icons and graphical objects you can fit on a screen, while still making it easy for users to find them. That's why they are restrictive, they have to choose only a narrow set of methods to expose to the users. By narrowing their available functionality they also become useful for a smaller domain of problems. Codify does not try to replace text-based programming, but instead to make it easier and sometimes more efficient for graphics-intensive programming. For example, the easy to reach color selector is much faster than having to use a separate tool to get the numbers for the color you want. Same thing for the image selector.
  • cageface 15y ago
    The Max/MSP environment gets around this problem by representing most of its rich library of objects as simple rectangles with descriptive names. People do manage to build some pretty sophisticated programs with it. http://www.cycling74.com http://www.cycling74.com
• minikomi 15y ago
  I wonder if someone will make a Piet editor for iphone/ipad! http://www.esolangs.org/wiki/Piet http://www.esolangs.org/wiki/Piet
• jonbro 15y ago
  you might want to take a look at stencyl as well, it isn't for ipad, but it is a pretty fully featured game dev tool that uses the scratch style programming.