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Check out Unreal Engine visual scripting using blueprints

by mentos 4y ago

ilaksh 4y ago
Unreal Engine Blueprints are probably the leading edge of practical software engineering right now. One of the core problems with programming is that anything that replaces complex colorful text editing is subconsciously attributed to being for users or beginners and therefore programmers do not want to be associated with it. This is the main thing holding back software engineering -- most programmers refuse to use these types of tools for fear of looking like users. And actually it's been like that for years. Probably the earliest example is SmallTalk. Then after that Visual Basic. Again this is subconscious for most people (I am a programmer myself and also feel the peer pressure to avoid using user-like tools). Of course at the bottom layer of Blueprints is adding new components with code and this is where the programming effort should be going. Again to some extent that is happening with game programming and Unreal Engine now.
- dzink 4y ago
  After experiencing xcode and the mix of gui and code needed to build iOS apps, I realized that having mixed medium makes it hard to figure out how to do something if you haven’t done it before and need examples. Using code alone allows for fast productivity because you can easily search and replace where needed. If you need to find out how to do something, you search the web and see examples. So your productivity speeds up substantially because you have all components in front of you to give you all necessary context at once. In XCode if there is something that requires a gui interaction to work, there are idiosyncrasies: some drag and drop needed or some deeply nested value in some third priority field that you don’t know about and you’re banging your head against a wall for each piece of functionality. Code puts everything on the same visibility level reachable through search (like a hash table). Gui alone also forces you to explore all fields and then experiment. But both mixed is hard.
- intelVISA 4y ago
  BPs are a weird case, its decent UX and good accessibility tricks a fair few non-programmers into a lot of subtle footguns, and sometimes in the pursuit of avoiding writing a few lines of code they will opt to handicap themselves with spaghetti monsters. https://blueprintsfromhell.tumblr.com/ https://blueprintsfromhell.tumblr.com/

Check out Unreal Engine visual scripting using blueprints

by mentos 4y ago

Check out Unreal Engine visual scripting using blueprints

Unreal Engine Blueprints are probably the leading edge of practical software engineering right now. One of the core problems with programming is that anything that replaces complex colorful text editing is subconsciously attributed to being for users or beginners and therefore programmers do not want to be associated with it. This is the main thing holding back software engineering -- most programmers refuse to use these types of tools for fear of looking like users. And actually it's been like that for years. Probably the earliest example is SmallTalk. Then after that Visual Basic. Again this is subconscious for most people (I am a programmer myself and also feel the peer pressure to avoid using user-like tools). Of course at the bottom layer of Blueprints is adding new components with code and this is where the programming effort should be going. Again to some extent that is happening with game programming and Unreal Engine now.

dzink 4y ago
After experiencing xcode and the mix of gui and code needed to build iOS apps, I realized that having mixed medium makes it hard to figure out how to do something if you haven’t done it before and need examples. Using code alone allows for fast productivity because you can easily search and replace where needed. If you need to find out how to do something, you search the web and see examples. So your productivity speeds up substantially because you have all components in front of you to give you all necessary context at once. In XCode if there is something that requires a gui interaction to work, there are idiosyncrasies: some drag and drop needed or some deeply nested value in some third priority field that you don’t know about and you’re banging your head against a wall for each piece of functionality. Code puts everything on the same visibility level reachable through search (like a hash table). Gui alone also forces you to explore all fields and then experiment. But both mixed is hard.
intelVISA 4y ago
BPs are a weird case, its decent UX and good accessibility tricks a fair few non-programmers into a lot of subtle footguns, and sometimes in the pursuit of avoiding writing a few lines of code they will opt to handicap themselves with spaghetti monsters. https://blueprintsfromhell.tumblr.com/ https://blueprintsfromhell.tumblr.com/