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Did some LabView programming as a student, didn't enjoy the experience. Graphical programs are similar to circuits without memory, and thus are less powerful t

by sesm 13y ago

Did some LabView programming as a student, didn't enjoy the experience. Graphical programs are similar to circuits without memory, and thus are less powerful then Turing machines. As a result, graphical programs quickly grow in size, and growth happens in 2 dimensions, which makes it very hard to read them.

Houshalter 13y ago
To be fair, text is merely a special case of graphical programming where the output is limited to a handful of characters and is completely linear. Is it impossible to improve upon that? Syntax highlighting and indentation were good improvements for example.
- lmm 13y ago
  It's possible to improve, but I think the key is progressive enhancement. Look at how IDEs tend to offer typing and implicit information in scala: it's there, it's very useful, but it doesn't stop you from seeing the plain text source code.
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
ansible 13y ago
Ugh, LabView. Do not want. One of my main gripes is lack of version control integration. I want to use something like git, and I want to be able to easily and succinctly see what's been changed by who. You have to look at the "code" only using their own GUI tool. Large functions involve lots of scrolling, and at least with Labview, I was not aware of any means by which to jump around to specific parts using hotkeys or such. You'd also have pages of logic stacked on top of each other, where you can only view one page at a time. If you're implementing something that is going to closely resemble a circuit of some kind, I suppose it is OK, but when things start to get complicated, I found the system cumbersome to navigate. This impedes comprehension, and invites mistakes. I've also used this other GUI-driven code generation system, and that had serious issues too. It has this hilarious graphical view of all the components, showing how they are connected to each other. However, due to the limited size of the window, it will just stack all the components almost on top of each other. If you started the laborious process to move them around to see what is going on, your layout would not be saved. So, anyway, a modest proposal: Figure out how to display an existing programming language (maybe a simple one like Lua) with a graphical view. Allow me to easily navigate through the code, and let me see all the details easily.
pcmonk 13y ago
See, that's exactly the problem with graphical programs nowadays. My program is essentially a layer on top of Racket, so it's much closer to textual programming than it looks like at first glance.

by sesm 13y ago

Houshalter 13y ago

To be fair, text is merely a special case of graphical programming where the output is limited to a handful of characters and is completely linear. Is it impossible to improve upon that? Syntax highlighting and indentation were good improvements for example.

lmm 13y ago
It's possible to improve, but I think the key is progressive enhancement. Look at how IDEs tend to offer typing and implicit information in scala: it's there, it's very useful, but it doesn't stop you from seeing the plain text source code.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]

ansible 13y ago

Ugh, LabView. Do not want. One of my main gripes is lack of version control integration. I want to use something like git, and I want to be able to easily and succinctly see what's been changed by who. You have to look at the "code" only using their own GUI tool. Large functions involve lots of scrolling, and at least with Labview, I was not aware of any means by which to jump around to specific parts using hotkeys or such. You'd also have pages of logic stacked on top of each other, where you can only view one page at a time. If you're implementing something that is going to closely resemble a circuit of some kind, I suppose it is OK, but when things start to get complicated, I found the system cumbersome to navigate. This impedes comprehension, and invites mistakes. I've also used this other GUI-driven code generation system, and that had serious issues too. It has this hilarious graphical view of all the components, showing how they are connected to each other. However, due to the limited size of the window, it will just stack all the components almost on top of each other. If you started the laborious process to move them around to see what is going on, your layout would not be saved. So, anyway, a modest proposal: Figure out how to display an existing programming language (maybe a simple one like Lua) with a graphical view. Allow me to easily navigate through the code, and let me see all the details easily.

pcmonk 13y ago

See, that's exactly the problem with graphical programs nowadays. My program is essentially a layer on top of Racket, so it's much closer to textual programming than it looks like at first glance.