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Graphical programming is one of those things that's often suggested as an improvement on textual programming, and just about every implementation tends to disap

Graphical programming is one of those things that's often suggested as an improvement on textual programming, and just about every implementation tends to disappoint. I know, when working on compilers, that nearly every time I go "I think I want to see the CFG as a graph here," I tend to realize no, that's not quite what I wanted. For a complex function, the surprising superpower is just to have an editor that shows the opening brace line of every currently-open brace. Another case in point: when was the last time you saw someone use a flowchart to describe the pseudocode of an algorithm, as opposed to writing, er, pseudocode? Flowcharts used to be the dominant way to do this, decades ago, but they seem to me to have been thoroughly supplanted by pseudocode...

WillAdams 2y ago
I think the problem here is that there isn't an agreed-upon answer for the question: >What does an algorithm look like? And any effort to answer it which gets beyond the size of a single diagram/screen/page/poster becomes a problem like to: https://blueprintsfromhell.tumblr.com/ https://blueprintsfromhell.tumblr.com/ https://scriptsofanotherdimension.tumblr.com/ https://scriptsofanotherdimension.tumblr.com/ I like to think of myself as a visual person, and I wish there was a good solution here, and I keep looking for and trying different solutions other folks have made (current two iterations are BlockCAD and OpenSCAD Graph Editor) --- I'd be glad of other suggestions, esp. if able to make graphic user interfaces more complex than the OpenSCAD Customizer.
- card_zero 2y ago
  Argh! Wire-wrapped backplanes! That wasn't the fantasy at all!
  - WillAdams 2y ago
    Yes, the fantasy is something like to Herman Hesse's _The Glass Bead Game_ which I mentioned elsethread --- what is the closest available tool to that? How do such tools manage the problem of encapsulation/modularity becoming the "wall of text" which one is trying to escape, just a pretty wall w/ all the labels in boxes decorated/connected w/ lines?

WillAdams 2y ago

I think the problem here is that there isn't an agreed-upon answer for the question: >What does an algorithm look like? And any effort to answer it which gets beyond the size of a single diagram/screen/page/poster becomes a problem like to: https://blueprintsfromhell.tumblr.com/ https://blueprintsfromhell.tumblr.com/ https://scriptsofanotherdimension.tumblr.com/ https://scriptsofanotherdimension.tumblr.com/ I like to think of myself as a visual person, and I wish there was a good solution here, and I keep looking for and trying different solutions other folks have made (current two iterations are BlockCAD and OpenSCAD Graph Editor) --- I'd be glad of other suggestions, esp. if able to make graphic user interfaces more complex than the OpenSCAD Customizer.

card_zero 2y ago
Argh! Wire-wrapped backplanes! That wasn't the fantasy at all!
- WillAdams 2y ago
  Yes, the fantasy is something like to Herman Hesse's _The Glass Bead Game_ which I mentioned elsethread --- what is the closest available tool to that? How do such tools manage the problem of encapsulation/modularity becoming the "wall of text" which one is trying to escape, just a pretty wall w/ all the labels in boxes decorated/connected w/ lines?