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The closest thing I've seen to this notion of what the OP seems to want is Adobe Flex and MXML. Microsoft has kind of the same thing going on with Silverlight a

The closest thing I've seen to this notion of what the OP seems to want is Adobe Flex and MXML. Microsoft has kind of the same thing going on with Silverlight and XAML (or whatever they are calling those things now). Microsoft put a lot of time and effort into the design tools and everything else to make that a good experience for designer and developer from what I can tell. The end result of visual design tools doesn't seem to match the hype. At some point you DO need programmers to make some of the magic happen. I think so far game development has probably done the most to merge the graphic designer, game designer, and programmer workflows into something that is productive for lots of people on the same project. I really think Apple is the last place you'll see much programming language innovation compared to what you already see in languages compiling to JS or the JVM or even LLVM.

programminggeek 13y ago
Also, if there is going to be a visual software development revolution, I think it will look something like a visual data flow language. Something along the lines of yahoo pipes meets rails or django. How it would work is you would have something like ActiveRecord that can pull data into the first step, then visual steps for mapping, calculating, etc.. and spitting that data into a HTML view or whatever in the last step. You could design the HTML in a WYSIWYG kind of thing or just as a tempting system. Doesn't matter. All it would be doing would be replacing a lot of the computation that programmers do with some functional lego block able logic in the middle. Once you had the mechanisms in place for this kind of system, I think you could swap out the data sources from a CSV file to a database to a restful service, and your design bits from HTML to iOS or whatever pretty easily, giving you the ability to work in a pretty general purpose way. A tool like that could be very interesting, but it's quite a different approach.

programminggeek 13y ago

Also, if there is going to be a visual software development revolution, I think it will look something like a visual data flow language. Something along the lines of yahoo pipes meets rails or django. How it would work is you would have something like ActiveRecord that can pull data into the first step, then visual steps for mapping, calculating, etc.. and spitting that data into a HTML view or whatever in the last step. You could design the HTML in a WYSIWYG kind of thing or just as a tempting system. Doesn't matter. All it would be doing would be replacing a lot of the computation that programmers do with some functional lego block able logic in the middle. Once you had the mechanisms in place for this kind of system, I think you could swap out the data sources from a CSV file to a database to a restful service, and your design bits from HTML to iOS or whatever pretty easily, giving you the ability to work in a pretty general purpose way. A tool like that could be very interesting, but it's quite a different approach.