3 ms·

Flow based programming has a funny way of being suppressed... this has been tried many, many times. Some examples off the top of my head: Scratch, Windows Workf

Flow based programming has a funny way of being suppressed... this has been tried many, many times. Some examples off the top of my head: Scratch, Windows Workflow Foundation, Arc Model Builder, etc. All of the marketing for NoFlo seems to be targeted at non-programmers who think "I could code anything if I could just understand the syntax!" Their main video basically says "Don't you wish you could finally stop paying those sneaky developers who act like everything takes longer than it really does? Now you can!"

skore 13y ago
> Their main video basically says "Don't you wish you could finally stop paying those sneaky developers who act like everything takes longer than it really does? Now you can!" That one point really gave me pause as well. As I posted the other day: ----- "If your bottom-line is dependent on code, you know the angst of asking a programmer, “How long will {{ insert feature }} take?” You know programmers can jargon-speak their way to your consent and when everything comes crashing down, you are to blame. NoFlo frees your businesses from a labyrinth of text files so you can get-a-grip on what-the-hell-is-going-on!" If you tell people that NoFlo is the solution to prevent programmers from "jargon-speaking" their way to your doom then... Sorry, that's just a lie with a topping of polarization. The way to prevent programmers messing up your business is to not hire shit programmers and manage good programmers properly. Not hiring the programmers with the fanciest visualization. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6198748 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6198748
desireco42 13y ago
Ha ha ha, if only :). But on serious note, with all the brains we have, we should've created some tools to automate things, progress is too slow. I think we can do way more.
- jarrett 13y ago
  Programming languages evolve slowly because they're more like mathematical notation than technology, so said someone smart whose identity I can't recall. Lots of smart people have been thinking for more than a half century about the following problem: How to elegantly tell a computer what to do? With all that brainpower invested in this problem, the low-hanging fruit is gone. It's understandable that progress is slow now. I doubt there are great programming paradigms waiting in the wings, waiting on technological advances like faster CPUs, more memory, or better graphics. After staggering expenditures of effort by some of the world's sharpest minds over more than half a century, I doubt there are any more major breakthroughs awaiting us in the field of programming languages. (Unless AI starts to play a major role, in which case I couldn't predict how programming would change.)
- cheald 13y ago
  > we should've created some tools to automate things, progress is too slow Most developer software is abstractions and tools to automate things. Tasks that were hard in 1995 are trivial today; most web developers have probably never had to think about the vast majority of things that web developers in 1995 concerned themselves with, because our libraries and frameworks and tools take care of them. The complexity of the trade is ever-increasing, though, and so we need new tools and new libraries and new frameworks to deal with that increasing complexity. This is the biggest place where visual programming falls apart - it's fine at dealing with programming as it existed when it was released, but programming is not a static discipline, and evolves wildly and rapidly. Non-sentient tools just simply can't keep up.
  - desireco42 13y ago
    True. But it was not all linear progress. In 1995 I had Turbo Pascal for example, that had ide with decent editor, fantastic debugger and profiler. And don't even start me on context sensitive help. What I have today is way crappier or non-existant. LightTable is tool that one guy started as a futuristic tool, yet it is what we had before. Complexity of our work is ever increasing and fun definitely never stops, I wish tools were better so we can enjoy languages more. As tools augment our ability to do work, having excellent tools would allow you to do more and be easier.
    - cheald 13y ago
      Plenty of tools do what you describe, and far better than Turbo Pascal did in the 90s. Try Visual Studio or IntelliJ, for example. When you can't perform static analysis (which is very difficult to do effectively in dynamically-typed languages), many of those tools you are talking about are just not possible.
- Helianthus 13y ago
  Just what exactly do you think programming _is_?
kazagistar 13y ago
Flow based programming is actually heavily used in music technology, where it actually is a good paradigm for the domain. Max/MSP and its open source cousin Pure Data are interesting, and have dedicated if small communities of not-exactly-programmers using them for real, creative expression. But most of the proposed use cases are clearly bullshit, and using these languages/programs makes it clear why: organizing code in a single dimension is already hard... organizing it properly and sensibly in two dimensions much more so, as well as a number of other issues with order and tracking race conditions. For anyone who wants to really evaluate this technology, I would give these products a try. Really though, functional programming and OOP both have sufficient support for data flows that it isn't really an issue for programmers.
joesb 13y ago
Scratch is not Flow-based programming. It's semi visual programming for kids, it only eliminate syntax error for kids but still produces code-like output.

skore 13y ago

> Their main video basically says "Don't you wish you could finally stop paying those sneaky developers who act like everything takes longer than it really does? Now you can!" That one point really gave me pause as well. As I posted the other day: ----- "If your bottom-line is dependent on code, you know the angst of asking a programmer, “How long will {{ insert feature }} take?” You know programmers can jargon-speak their way to your consent and when everything comes crashing down, you are to blame. NoFlo frees your businesses from a labyrinth of text files so you can get-a-grip on what-the-hell-is-going-on!" If you tell people that NoFlo is the solution to prevent programmers from "jargon-speaking" their way to your doom then... Sorry, that's just a lie with a topping of polarization. The way to prevent programmers messing up your business is to not hire shit programmers and manage good programmers properly. Not hiring the programmers with the fanciest visualization. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6198748 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6198748

desireco42 13y ago

Ha ha ha, if only :). But on serious note, with all the brains we have, we should've created some tools to automate things, progress is too slow. I think we can do way more.

jarrett 13y ago
Programming languages evolve slowly because they're more like mathematical notation than technology, so said someone smart whose identity I can't recall. Lots of smart people have been thinking for more than a half century about the following problem: How to elegantly tell a computer what to do? With all that brainpower invested in this problem, the low-hanging fruit is gone. It's understandable that progress is slow now. I doubt there are great programming paradigms waiting in the wings, waiting on technological advances like faster CPUs, more memory, or better graphics. After staggering expenditures of effort by some of the world's sharpest minds over more than half a century, I doubt there are any more major breakthroughs awaiting us in the field of programming languages. (Unless AI starts to play a major role, in which case I couldn't predict how programming would change.)
cheald 13y ago
> we should've created some tools to automate things, progress is too slow Most developer software is abstractions and tools to automate things. Tasks that were hard in 1995 are trivial today; most web developers have probably never had to think about the vast majority of things that web developers in 1995 concerned themselves with, because our libraries and frameworks and tools take care of them. The complexity of the trade is ever-increasing, though, and so we need new tools and new libraries and new frameworks to deal with that increasing complexity. This is the biggest place where visual programming falls apart - it's fine at dealing with programming as it existed when it was released, but programming is not a static discipline, and evolves wildly and rapidly. Non-sentient tools just simply can't keep up.
- desireco42 13y ago
  True. But it was not all linear progress. In 1995 I had Turbo Pascal for example, that had ide with decent editor, fantastic debugger and profiler. And don't even start me on context sensitive help. What I have today is way crappier or non-existant. LightTable is tool that one guy started as a futuristic tool, yet it is what we had before. Complexity of our work is ever increasing and fun definitely never stops, I wish tools were better so we can enjoy languages more. As tools augment our ability to do work, having excellent tools would allow you to do more and be easier.
  - cheald 13y ago
    Plenty of tools do what you describe, and far better than Turbo Pascal did in the 90s. Try Visual Studio or IntelliJ, for example. When you can't perform static analysis (which is very difficult to do effectively in dynamically-typed languages), many of those tools you are talking about are just not possible.
Helianthus 13y ago
Just what exactly do you think programming _is_?

kazagistar 13y ago

Flow based programming is actually heavily used in music technology, where it actually is a good paradigm for the domain. Max/MSP and its open source cousin Pure Data are interesting, and have dedicated if small communities of not-exactly-programmers using them for real, creative expression. But most of the proposed use cases are clearly bullshit, and using these languages/programs makes it clear why: organizing code in a single dimension is already hard... organizing it properly and sensibly in two dimensions much more so, as well as a number of other issues with order and tracking race conditions. For anyone who wants to really evaluate this technology, I would give these products a try. Really though, functional programming and OOP both have sufficient support for data flows that it isn't really an issue for programmers.

joesb 13y ago

Scratch is not Flow-based programming. It's semi visual programming for kids, it only eliminate syntax error for kids but still produces code-like output.