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Oh dear. I think they may fall over in surprise when they realize that this technology become commercially viable while they were busy writing this academic pap

Oh dear. I think they may fall over in surprise when they realize that this technology become commercially viable while they were busy writing this academic paper...

lukan 4mo ago
Can you elaborate?
- Chu4eeno 4mo ago
  I assume he's referring to the massive commercial success of Holy-C and TempleOS. (It's the only programming language with inline graphics I can think of, at least, your average esoteric visual language tend to not mix with normal code.)
  - tudelo 4mo ago
    You can use images inline in Racket. Decidedly less esoteric :)
  - voidUpdate 4mo ago
    I was going to mention holyC here, but I don't think it is the same thing. holyC lets you embed images etc in the code, but those images don't become part of the logic. This paper is talking about mixing graphical programming languages with textual ones (like a file with both scratch blocks and c code in)
    - conartist6 4mo ago
      Yeah I'm not talking about that. I'm thinking more like "a C program is just a parse tree, so why couldn't a visual tool help you visualize or rearrange the parse tree?" This academic paper assumes two largely unmixed disciplines just barely kissing each other. I see a complete blending coming that will melt the boundaries between textual and visual programming. Once you start thinking like this, you stop seeing semantic editing as a feature of a particular language: it should just be a native ability to have on any parseable code: the ability to reassemble the parse tree nodes like lego bricks.
      - michael-ax 4mo ago
        I entirely agree with you, and I'll raise you one -- coding via AST's lets you formally note and track the boundary/linking facts and concepts via comments. That might finally get us out of the stone-age!
- conartist6 4mo ago
  You won't find it in any of the academic literature because it's not an academic project: https://bablr.org/ https://bablr.org/ BABLR is just the extensible streaming parser framework, but it has a few key things going for it: 1. Gap support like Hazel has, but for any language it can parse 2. Streaming parse results, which make multi-pass stream transformation easy 3. The ability to consolidate and take over the work currently done by Treesitter, LSP, Git, and the IDE itself.
  - lukan 4mo ago
    So bablr is from you? "BABLR is a parser framework roughly comparable to Tree-sitter, but built from the ground up for the web" I have to admit, I don't know why I would stop using my wasm build of treesitter that works amazing on the web for something that is "conditionally production ready". Also I don't see where your project mixed visual and textual code like this paper here explores?
    - conartist6 4mo ago
      Yeah it's by me. It isn't the purpose of the project to be able to make visual widgets, just an ability that arises naturally when your state layer holds both structure and text.
  - IshKebab 4mo ago
    That does not look like a visual programming language?
    - conartist6 4mo ago
      It isn't! It's a version control system and IDE state layer that can make EVERY programming language visual at the same time
      - IshKebab 4mo ago
        So, where is this commercially viable visual programming language you claimed exists?
whatever1 4mo ago
I mean visual programming is standard in game development. Did not get traction in the rest of the dev community. Now it does not matter anyways. We are not reading/ writing code anymore. Just specifying it and testing it.
- brookst 4mo ago
  Grasshopper is massively successful in the CAD space. If you’ve looked at a building and thought “that doesn’t seem possible”, it’s probably grasshopper. See: https://www.grasshopper3d.com/page/architecture-projects https://www.grasshopper3d.com/page/architecture-projects But I drive grasshopper with Claude code, so still 100% agree with your last graf.
- conartist6 4mo ago
  Yeah but that's pure visual programming, not a hybridization of the best parts of visual and textual programming. Anyone who thinks code doesn't matter anymore is selling something. Trying saying "math won't matter anymore" while clicking your heels three times
- binary0010 4mo ago
  I don't know, my vibe coder friends always talk about wanting a visual programming language so they can understand the systems they make. So I feel like your last sentence doesn't really track - yes they are like you , just telling specifications to the machine, but they can struggle for hours trying to get those specific instructions right because they can't understand what their systems are doing.

Oh dear. I think they may fall over in surprise when they realize that this technology become commercially viable while they were busy writing this academic paper...

lukan 4mo ago

Can you elaborate?

Chu4eeno 4mo ago
I assume he's referring to the massive commercial success of Holy-C and TempleOS. (It's the only programming language with inline graphics I can think of, at least, your average esoteric visual language tend to not mix with normal code.)
- tudelo 4mo ago
  You can use images inline in Racket. Decidedly less esoteric :)
- voidUpdate 4mo ago
  I was going to mention holyC here, but I don't think it is the same thing. holyC lets you embed images etc in the code, but those images don't become part of the logic. This paper is talking about mixing graphical programming languages with textual ones (like a file with both scratch blocks and c code in)
  - conartist6 4mo ago
    Yeah I'm not talking about that. I'm thinking more like "a C program is just a parse tree, so why couldn't a visual tool help you visualize or rearrange the parse tree?" This academic paper assumes two largely unmixed disciplines just barely kissing each other. I see a complete blending coming that will melt the boundaries between textual and visual programming. Once you start thinking like this, you stop seeing semantic editing as a feature of a particular language: it should just be a native ability to have on any parseable code: the ability to reassemble the parse tree nodes like lego bricks.
    - michael-ax 4mo ago
      I entirely agree with you, and I'll raise you one -- coding via AST's lets you formally note and track the boundary/linking facts and concepts via comments. That might finally get us out of the stone-age!
conartist6 4mo ago
You won't find it in any of the academic literature because it's not an academic project: https://bablr.org/ https://bablr.org/ BABLR is just the extensible streaming parser framework, but it has a few key things going for it: 1. Gap support like Hazel has, but for any language it can parse 2. Streaming parse results, which make multi-pass stream transformation easy 3. The ability to consolidate and take over the work currently done by Treesitter, LSP, Git, and the IDE itself.
- lukan 4mo ago
  So bablr is from you? "BABLR is a parser framework roughly comparable to Tree-sitter, but built from the ground up for the web" I have to admit, I don't know why I would stop using my wasm build of treesitter that works amazing on the web for something that is "conditionally production ready". Also I don't see where your project mixed visual and textual code like this paper here explores?
  - conartist6 4mo ago
    Yeah it's by me. It isn't the purpose of the project to be able to make visual widgets, just an ability that arises naturally when your state layer holds both structure and text.
- IshKebab 4mo ago
  That does not look like a visual programming language?
  - conartist6 4mo ago
    It isn't! It's a version control system and IDE state layer that can make EVERY programming language visual at the same time
    - IshKebab 4mo ago
      So, where is this commercially viable visual programming language you claimed exists?

whatever1 4mo ago

I mean visual programming is standard in game development. Did not get traction in the rest of the dev community. Now it does not matter anyways. We are not reading/ writing code anymore. Just specifying it and testing it.

brookst 4mo ago
Grasshopper is massively successful in the CAD space. If you’ve looked at a building and thought “that doesn’t seem possible”, it’s probably grasshopper. See: https://www.grasshopper3d.com/page/architecture-projects https://www.grasshopper3d.com/page/architecture-projects But I drive grasshopper with Claude code, so still 100% agree with your last graf.
conartist6 4mo ago
Yeah but that's pure visual programming, not a hybridization of the best parts of visual and textual programming. Anyone who thinks code doesn't matter anymore is selling something. Trying saying "math won't matter anymore" while clicking your heels three times
binary0010 4mo ago
I don't know, my vibe coder friends always talk about wanting a visual programming language so they can understand the systems they make. So I feel like your last sentence doesn't really track - yes they are like you , just telling specifications to the machine, but they can struggle for hours trying to get those specific instructions right because they can't understand what their systems are doing.