6 ms·

If you are a skeptic on this, I really urge you to listen to Bret Victor. I have generally been skeptical of these kinds of things in the past, but just in the

by JunkDNA 14y ago

If you are a skeptic on this, I really urge you to listen to Bret Victor. I have generally been skeptical of these kinds of things in the past, but just in the last week Bret Victor's talk (http://youtu.be/PUv66718DII http://youtu.be/PUv66718DII) combined with his excellent 2006 paper that digs into related concepts (http://worrydream.com/MagicInk/ http://worrydream.com/MagicInk/) has made me re-think that position. One of the key points in his talk that made me think about this more is that there are whole avenues of exploration that are completely inaccessible when the feedback loop is as long as it is with current programming techniques. I think it depends highly on the kind of programming you do. The more closely related your programming is to math (e.g. engineering simulations or stats), the less likely you are to see an issue because you're directly manipulating the "stuff" you're working on. But if you write software that operates more in the human space (e.g. something like an email client), then you're acutely aware of how far removed the code is from the user and what the program does. You basically have to keep a giant mental model in your head as you code. That is a huge cognitive load that all of us take for granted as part of "programming" but why must this be so?

mattmanser 14y ago
I'm skeptical because I remember the RAD tools of the early 00s that were going to let businessmen program. Oh, and who can forget the wonderful workflow systems that were all the rage soon after? There seemed to be a new one released every week. I invite you to go try MS's WWF, that's 'visual'. What a nightmare that is. They don't work. You need a programmer involved because edge cases rapidly become complicated and that's the hard bit, not visualizing a workflow. And these tools deprive you the programmer of the fine grained control you sorely need or worse generate code that's so hard to read and work with that it's faster coding from scratch even for amateurs. I love Bret Victor's vision, but because of what it means for programmers, not the fuzzy 'creatives' in the article. I know some animation guys and yes, you can visually automate things like animation now, but logic flow? No. Though I think we should keep trying.
- endergen 14y ago
  I met with Bret Victor for lunch while visiting SF a few years ago and I specifically argued against visual programming languages making anyone able to program. I mean I know that some people are more inclined to think in blocks and visual metaphors (Hell most programmers draw out ideas constantly cause we do too) but any sufficient program eventually gets complicated enough that visual programming kind of breaks down unless it gets more and more abstract to make reusable components and modules that you can navigate too etc. I pushed at the time and I'm not even sure he remembers at this point but for augmenting text based programming and making what's happening more visual and real-time. Which seems to be some of the direction he's taking which is combining his great ideas in visualization with traditional text based programming environments. I was also a huge fan of Javascript as the lingua franca despite it's deficiencies because web based IDEs and examples were inherently so much more shareable than code you had to download and try (There could be ways around this such as a desktop repository of code viewer, but that's a friction point to people actually checking out demos/examples interactively ala JSBin as such.) I'm personally loving what Kahn academy is doing that John Resig credits Bret Victor's talk on Inventing on Principle (http://vimeo.com/36579366 http://vimeo.com/36579366) as a major inspiration. See article where he announces and explains their in browser interaction learning of CS course material: http://ejohn.org/blog/introducing-khan-cs/ http://ejohn.org/blog/introducing-khan-cs/ In closing to name a view limitations of most visual programming languages: the naming problem (Most parts of your system need to be named in order to be able to talk about them), text based is stronger at this. Instantiation of reuseable code is pretty abstract to do visually. Eventually all programming gets complicated enough that text based approach really is easier to work with. Not to mention all the tools you can't leverage comparitvely to text based such as version control, REPLs, etc. I guess I think visual programming is idealized and people are spending all this time learning something that isn't as useful to know in the long term compared to traditional programming because all the important platforms have much richer support for text based programming (iOS, linux, C/C++ for games). But combining visualization of code execution is the perfect balance and would lead to basically replacing much commenting with an actual intuitive visualization of runtime complex structures/state. And definitely real time feedback of tuning /visual parameters is great. In the game industry all of this is very standard and I do feel there is a little more awe for his work than would be given by your typical graphics, art tool, or demo scene programming devs. Most game development toosl for say level editing and animation are all highly visual and real time interactive. Same goes for any serious AI dev they have debugging tools for visualizing all planning for entities communication, path planning, animation states, and more. Anyway, just my thoughts. Still think Bret Victor is one of the most compelling thinkers in this space.
bluedanieru 14y ago
I first got into programming using Hypercard on the machines at my middle school. I started out just visually building simple stacks that didn't really do much, until a teacher showed me some of the stuff older kids had built by manipulating the Hypertalk language underneath. It was like learning about the Matrix. I looked at what they did and copied it for my own stuff, eventually learning a significant portion of the Hypertalk language. Fun times. As such, I think 'visual' programming might be great to rope people in, but it isn't enough. Had I not taken it to the next level, I would have gotten bored, simply because I couldn't do that much with the tools I knew about. Drilling down a bit was hard, but necessary. In the case of Hypercard, of course I had to drill down because the tools for putting together complicated stuff visually weren't there. But, there is a reason they weren't there, that being that Hypertalk, while having a steeper learning curve than buttons and slides, was a more efficient and concise way to represent more complex stuff. There's really no way around that. At its best, visual programming can be a way for non-programmers to put together really, really, simple stuff that they think they need. (It can be much worse than this, I've worked with a framework that was originally designed for this purpose or something like it, for middle office banking software - worse 18 months of my fucking life, and the worst part was none of the non-programmers it was originally targeted towards would go near it.) For everything else we need more robust tools. And let's not forget that the hard part of programming isn't even the syntax anyway. It's the concepts. Even if you could design a visual programming 'language' just as rich as any text-based one, anyone who wanted to do anything with it would still have to learn all the same concepts. And that's the hard part.
- JunkDNA 14y ago
  I guess I tend to think about it like this: is the current state of the art for programming the best that we can ever do? If the answer is "no" (which it most certainly is), then what does the future look like? Great strides have been made in shortening the "edit, compile, run, test" feedback loop because it's recognized that this saps creativity and flow the longer the amount of time it is. The natural progression of that is instantaneous feedback (excitement about Christ Granger's Light Table shows this). Once you have instantaneous feedback, the next logical step is some kind of direct manipulation. Visual programming (at least as currently imagined) may not be the right kind of direct manipulation, but there simply has to be a better way than typing text in one window and seeing the output in another. I think lots of the comments here are thinking too much about visual programming metaphors that have been bolted onto existing programming paradigms. I suspect those are clunky because existing programming paradigms are clunky when represented visually. I'm not sure that means that in the universe of possible programming paradigms, there doesn't exist some form that is better when represented visually.
emelski 14y ago
I'm skeptical because I don't see how visual programming models are even possible for the type of development I routinely perform (my day job is writing a high-performance distributed, parallel implementation of the well-known 'make' tool). Even if it is theoretically possible, for some parts of my project, I imagine it would take nearly as long to create the visual programming environment, and I'm not sure it would be particularly reusable. I loved Bret Victor's talk. And this recursive drawing thing is neat too. But both of those are dealing with programs that are primarily visual in their own output. I can't help but think, "That's neat, but not broadly applicable." Honestly, how many people are there out there dying to write programs to make fractal-like pictures? Perhaps I'm just not visionary enough to see the potential, but I don't believe these techniques will really "democratize programming." Whether or not doing so is desirable in the first place is another debate altogether.

by JunkDNA 14y ago

mattmanser 14y ago

I'm skeptical because I remember the RAD tools of the early 00s that were going to let businessmen program. Oh, and who can forget the wonderful workflow systems that were all the rage soon after? There seemed to be a new one released every week. I invite you to go try MS's WWF, that's 'visual'. What a nightmare that is. They don't work. You need a programmer involved because edge cases rapidly become complicated and that's the hard bit, not visualizing a workflow. And these tools deprive you the programmer of the fine grained control you sorely need or worse generate code that's so hard to read and work with that it's faster coding from scratch even for amateurs. I love Bret Victor's vision, but because of what it means for programmers, not the fuzzy 'creatives' in the article. I know some animation guys and yes, you can visually automate things like animation now, but logic flow? No. Though I think we should keep trying.

endergen 14y ago
I met with Bret Victor for lunch while visiting SF a few years ago and I specifically argued against visual programming languages making anyone able to program. I mean I know that some people are more inclined to think in blocks and visual metaphors (Hell most programmers draw out ideas constantly cause we do too) but any sufficient program eventually gets complicated enough that visual programming kind of breaks down unless it gets more and more abstract to make reusable components and modules that you can navigate too etc. I pushed at the time and I'm not even sure he remembers at this point but for augmenting text based programming and making what's happening more visual and real-time. Which seems to be some of the direction he's taking which is combining his great ideas in visualization with traditional text based programming environments. I was also a huge fan of Javascript as the lingua franca despite it's deficiencies because web based IDEs and examples were inherently so much more shareable than code you had to download and try (There could be ways around this such as a desktop repository of code viewer, but that's a friction point to people actually checking out demos/examples interactively ala JSBin as such.) I'm personally loving what Kahn academy is doing that John Resig credits Bret Victor's talk on Inventing on Principle (http://vimeo.com/36579366 http://vimeo.com/36579366) as a major inspiration. See article where he announces and explains their in browser interaction learning of CS course material: http://ejohn.org/blog/introducing-khan-cs/ http://ejohn.org/blog/introducing-khan-cs/ In closing to name a view limitations of most visual programming languages: the naming problem (Most parts of your system need to be named in order to be able to talk about them), text based is stronger at this. Instantiation of reuseable code is pretty abstract to do visually. Eventually all programming gets complicated enough that text based approach really is easier to work with. Not to mention all the tools you can't leverage comparitvely to text based such as version control, REPLs, etc. I guess I think visual programming is idealized and people are spending all this time learning something that isn't as useful to know in the long term compared to traditional programming because all the important platforms have much richer support for text based programming (iOS, linux, C/C++ for games). But combining visualization of code execution is the perfect balance and would lead to basically replacing much commenting with an actual intuitive visualization of runtime complex structures/state. And definitely real time feedback of tuning /visual parameters is great. In the game industry all of this is very standard and I do feel there is a little more awe for his work than would be given by your typical graphics, art tool, or demo scene programming devs. Most game development toosl for say level editing and animation are all highly visual and real time interactive. Same goes for any serious AI dev they have debugging tools for visualizing all planning for entities communication, path planning, animation states, and more. Anyway, just my thoughts. Still think Bret Victor is one of the most compelling thinkers in this space.

bluedanieru 14y ago

I first got into programming using Hypercard on the machines at my middle school. I started out just visually building simple stacks that didn't really do much, until a teacher showed me some of the stuff older kids had built by manipulating the Hypertalk language underneath. It was like learning about the Matrix. I looked at what they did and copied it for my own stuff, eventually learning a significant portion of the Hypertalk language. Fun times. As such, I think 'visual' programming might be great to rope people in, but it isn't enough. Had I not taken it to the next level, I would have gotten bored, simply because I couldn't do that much with the tools I knew about. Drilling down a bit was hard, but necessary. In the case of Hypercard, of course I had to drill down because the tools for putting together complicated stuff visually weren't there. But, there is a reason they weren't there, that being that Hypertalk, while having a steeper learning curve than buttons and slides, was a more efficient and concise way to represent more complex stuff. There's really no way around that. At its best, visual programming can be a way for non-programmers to put together really, really, simple stuff that they think they need. (It can be much worse than this, I've worked with a framework that was originally designed for this purpose or something like it, for middle office banking software - worse 18 months of my fucking life, and the worst part was none of the non-programmers it was originally targeted towards would go near it.) For everything else we need more robust tools. And let's not forget that the hard part of programming isn't even the syntax anyway. It's the concepts. Even if you could design a visual programming 'language' just as rich as any text-based one, anyone who wanted to do anything with it would still have to learn all the same concepts. And that's the hard part.

JunkDNA 14y ago
I guess I tend to think about it like this: is the current state of the art for programming the best that we can ever do? If the answer is "no" (which it most certainly is), then what does the future look like? Great strides have been made in shortening the "edit, compile, run, test" feedback loop because it's recognized that this saps creativity and flow the longer the amount of time it is. The natural progression of that is instantaneous feedback (excitement about Christ Granger's Light Table shows this). Once you have instantaneous feedback, the next logical step is some kind of direct manipulation. Visual programming (at least as currently imagined) may not be the right kind of direct manipulation, but there simply has to be a better way than typing text in one window and seeing the output in another. I think lots of the comments here are thinking too much about visual programming metaphors that have been bolted onto existing programming paradigms. I suspect those are clunky because existing programming paradigms are clunky when represented visually. I'm not sure that means that in the universe of possible programming paradigms, there doesn't exist some form that is better when represented visually.

emelski 14y ago

I'm skeptical because I don't see how visual programming models are even possible for the type of development I routinely perform (my day job is writing a high-performance distributed, parallel implementation of the well-known 'make' tool). Even if it is theoretically possible, for some parts of my project, I imagine it would take nearly as long to create the visual programming environment, and I'm not sure it would be particularly reusable. I loved Bret Victor's talk. And this recursive drawing thing is neat too. But both of those are dealing with programs that are primarily visual in their own output. I can't help but think, "That's neat, but not broadly applicable." Honestly, how many people are there out there dying to write programs to make fractal-like pictures? Perhaps I'm just not visionary enough to see the potential, but I don't believe these techniques will really "democratize programming." Whether or not doing so is desirable in the first place is another debate altogether.