3 ms·

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 c

by 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.

sbmassey 14y ago
Any programming paradigm is going to at minimum have something like an if statement. Say you wanted to do something when two items compare equal, in text you could write something like: if (a == b) { ... } With a visual metaphor, you are going to have to have some way of setting up entities representing the 'if', and the '==' predicate, along with references to wherever 'a' and 'b' are defined, and a way of getting to the block of code that executes when the condition is true. I find it hard to conceive that any kind of direct manipulation of code at this level is going to be better than text, whether you're trying to understand it or modify it. I grant you visual tools for manipulating higher level stuff like data schema's, gui's, and so forth work well, but I'm guessing they'll always need text for the underlying logic.

by JunkDNA 14y ago

sbmassey 14y ago

Any programming paradigm is going to at minimum have something like an if statement. Say you wanted to do something when two items compare equal, in text you could write something like: if (a == b) { ... } With a visual metaphor, you are going to have to have some way of setting up entities representing the 'if', and the '==' predicate, along with references to wherever 'a' and 'b' are defined, and a way of getting to the block of code that executes when the condition is true. I find it hard to conceive that any kind of direct manipulation of code at this level is going to be better than text, whether you're trying to understand it or modify it. I grant you visual tools for manipulating higher level stuff like data schema's, gui's, and so forth work well, but I'm guessing they'll always need text for the underlying logic.