3 ms·
All of the "block" style visual languages are just Lisp with colored blocks instead of parentheses. Alice, App Inventor, Blockly, Hopscotch, Intentional Techno
by jcromartie 13y ago
All of the "block" style visual languages are just Lisp with colored blocks instead of parentheses.
Alice, App Inventor, Blockly, Hopscotch, Intentional Technology, Lamdu, Minibloq, Scheme Bricks (obviously), Scratch.
I've built these sorts of things before to let users define logic through a web interface. I think that's about the extent of their usefulness.
The dataflow languages seem much more interesting.
- seanmcdirmid 13y agoThey are like lisp without cons/cdr, higher order functions, or homonicity. Oh, wait, they aren't like lisp at all.
- jimbokun 13y agoI'm not familiar with those languages, but are you sure those environments don't include the things you mention? Even homoiconicity, I don't see why you couldn't write a program to manipulate the blocks (or whatever) on the screen to create a new program. I don't know if those environments support such construction, but I don't see any reason why it would be particularly difficult to implement.
- seanmcdirmid 13y agoNone of those VPLs include those features; they would be too complicated for their target audience. They only resemble LISP in that they mostly are procedural (some of them are rule-based, but you can do rules in LISP also given its Turing Completeness). There is a VPL based on LISP, I forgot the name, but you could definitely say it is LISP then. The point was that saying these were all like LISP is like saying they are all like machine code.
- CmonDev 13y agoAgent Model is even more interesting IMHO.
- TeMPOraL 13y agoYup. My first reaction to this: http://blog.interfacevision.com/assets/img/posts/example_visual_language_pwct_01.png http://blog.interfacevision.com/assets/img/posts/example_vis... was 'omg, lisp displayed with TreeView; and let me guess what the serialization format of this is' (probably XML).