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Yeah, I've worked with dataflow languages and they're a very good fit for data transformations (not so much for complex runtime control flow). Functional-reacti
by TuringTest 4y ago
Yeah, I've worked with dataflow languages and they're a very good fit for data transformations (not so much for complex runtime control flow). Functional-reactive languages like spreadsheets also make it way easier to reason about than imperative programming.
I like environments where you can keep visualization aids close to the code to which they apply; nowadays, that means using online notebooks a la Jupyter and ObservableHQ, or at least markdown files with a preview plugin integrated in your IDE. There you can represent diagrams as code, like Graphviz and Mermaid.
I long for the day that those visual representations can be accessed programmatically and used as part of the code itself, like VB6 interactive widgets were created graphically yet usable in the application; e.g. creating state machines visually by representing states and transitions as boxes and arrows, then compiling the diagram to add conditions and access their values from code (there are some libraries doing this in some environments and languages, but I'm not aware of one that is portable to many languages). I think we're really close to that being possible with modern languages.