3 ms·

Oddly enough, PLCs are another example of a dataflow programming being intuitive for regular people -- the others being LabVIEW and Excel. Of course I'm exagger

Oddly enough, PLCs are another example of a dataflow programming being intuitive for regular people -- the others being LabVIEW and Excel. Of course I'm exaggerating a bit by putting all 3 of these tools into a single category, but I also don't think it's outrageous to make this claim. Indeed, PLC's originated with GM calling for a programmable controller that could be used without having to completely re-train their large workforce of control engineers and technicians, who were already familiar with relays, mechanical timers, switches, and so forth.

vvanders 3y ago
It's funny, I spent a good long while in gamedev with various visual tools(UE3 Kismet[1], node/UI editors in Maya/MAX, etc). The parallels between PLC workflow and those are uncanny. Might be one of the few industries where I've seen visual hot-code reloading on-the-fly in production scenarios used at scale. The visual debugging of ladder is really similar to debugging tools we had, heck FBD[2] comes really close as well. Kind of an interesting covergent evolution of two different domains coming to very similar tools. [1] https://docs.unrealengine.com/udk/Three/KismetUserGuide.html https://docs.unrealengine.com/udk/Three/KismetUserGuide.html [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Function_block_diagram https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Function_block_diagram