5 ms·

> Programmers are proud of their ability to create textual source code that is processed to create programs or output. I fundamentally disagree with this. You'

> Programmers are proud of their ability to create textual source code that is processed to create programs or output. I fundamentally disagree with this. You're acting like programmers/hackers do things in a textual way just to justify their existence. Those GUI tools you posit exist—my Dad (who is technical but not a programmer by trade) used FileMaker to develop a little app for his church sometime in the early '90s and still to this day uses it. Does it matter that he didn't write any code? No. He produced a useful app and it's that end result that matters. The problem is not that those tools don't exist, and it's not that "real" programmers look down on them just because they aren't textual. The problem is that those kind of tools are just fine, as long as you don't do anything complicated. Once you stray a little off the path of their standard use case then they crumble into a pile of leaky abstractions. When you're dealing with textual programming languages it's generally much easier to stray from the beaten path since they are usually much less constrained. If you're writing a web app in Ruby, or Node, or Java, or whatever, you can do anything. It's more flexible, but at the cost of being more complicated. And the more complicated things get, the harder they are to shoehorn into a gui. I'd love to see a gui programming language that was as open ended, as easy/quick to edit, and as easy to visualize as textual code in a text editor is, but they don't exist. And I fear they never will.

TuringTest 12y ago
I think you will be pleasantly surprised in the next ten years or so. The seeds for such programming languages have been everywhere in the last couple of years or so, if you know where to look.
- mantrax5 12y ago
  The seeds have been "everywhere in the last couple of years" for decades now. It's the programmer version of "flying cars are coming".
  - TuringTest 12y ago
    The best part is that there are actual working systems now.
    - mantrax5 12y ago
      It's been the case for decades. Literally before PARC had their Alto nailed down, there have been visual programming languages where you draw and connect boxes in order to program. And you should think really hard why (for the most part) we don't program this way today. It's not because we're just stubborn. BTW, there are actual flying cars too.
      - TuringTest 12y ago
        I agree that "draw and connect boxes" is an awful interface for general programming. But I've used it and it's terrific for some data manipulation tasks; and there are other visual paradigms that are not based on Boxes and Arrows (such as UML/model-based architectures, visual constraints, "Programming on Principle", whole-execution "rewindable" debuggers...) that offer substantial benefits even for some more general - so there's people who ''do'' program this way, and find it better in some scenarios. The idea is that, as computers are more powerful and can support visual tools that were impractical in the 80's and 90's, more programming styles can be created that aren't based on "one-dimensional stream of characters". Heck, even syntax highlighting and Python's "significant indentation" provide visual usability advantages over earlier language approaches. There's nothing inherently superior in the sticking to the old ways other than "it has always been that way".
        acqq 12y ago
        The computers were strong enough to make visual tools possible even 20 years ago. It's the clumsiness and the limited expressiveness of interaction that limited the acceptance. I know: I was there. I remember reading Stroustrup who around the beginning of C++ wrote something like "we don't have to worry about ineffectiveness of headers in C++ because we'll anyway use visual tools soon." There were actually some tools. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rational_Software http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rational_Software "Rose 1.0 was introduced at OOPSLA in 1992") They stunk: http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?RationalRose http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?RationalRose
ilaksh 12y ago
> —my Dad (who is technical but not a programmer by trade) If he wrote it in a 'real' programming (textual) computer language you might have written that differently. You might have written "technical but not really a programmer" or something. > Does it matter that he didn't write any code? No. Yes, it does, because if he had you would have given him credit for being a programmer and acknowledged that his application is complicated. I wonder how long it took your father to create that application with FileMaker. I would like to see how long it would take you to code it "from scratch" using your favorite "real" programming system.
- __david__ 12y ago
  > If he wrote it in a 'real' programming (textual) computer language you might have written that differently. You might have written "technical but not really a programmer" or something. I wrote it the way I did because it's more nuanced than that. My dad can program. He's written assembly and knows some C. But he's not a programmer by trade—he's a hardware guy.

TuringTest 12y ago

I think you will be pleasantly surprised in the next ten years or so. The seeds for such programming languages have been everywhere in the last couple of years or so, if you know where to look.

mantrax5 12y ago
The seeds have been "everywhere in the last couple of years" for decades now. It's the programmer version of "flying cars are coming".
- TuringTest 12y ago
  The best part is that there are actual working systems now.
  - mantrax5 12y ago
    It's been the case for decades. Literally before PARC had their Alto nailed down, there have been visual programming languages where you draw and connect boxes in order to program. And you should think really hard why (for the most part) we don't program this way today. It's not because we're just stubborn. BTW, there are actual flying cars too.
    - TuringTest 12y ago
      I agree that "draw and connect boxes" is an awful interface for general programming. But I've used it and it's terrific for some data manipulation tasks; and there are other visual paradigms that are not based on Boxes and Arrows (such as UML/model-based architectures, visual constraints, "Programming on Principle", whole-execution "rewindable" debuggers...) that offer substantial benefits even for some more general - so there's people who ''do'' program this way, and find it better in some scenarios. The idea is that, as computers are more powerful and can support visual tools that were impractical in the 80's and 90's, more programming styles can be created that aren't based on "one-dimensional stream of characters". Heck, even syntax highlighting and Python's "significant indentation" provide visual usability advantages over earlier language approaches. There's nothing inherently superior in the sticking to the old ways other than "it has always been that way".
      - acqq 12y ago
        The computers were strong enough to make visual tools possible even 20 years ago. It's the clumsiness and the limited expressiveness of interaction that limited the acceptance. I know: I was there. I remember reading Stroustrup who around the beginning of C++ wrote something like "we don't have to worry about ineffectiveness of headers in C++ because we'll anyway use visual tools soon." There were actually some tools. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rational_Software http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rational_Software "Rose 1.0 was introduced at OOPSLA in 1992") They stunk: http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?RationalRose http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?RationalRose

ilaksh 12y ago

> —my Dad (who is technical but not a programmer by trade) If he wrote it in a 'real' programming (textual) computer language you might have written that differently. You might have written "technical but not really a programmer" or something. > Does it matter that he didn't write any code? No. Yes, it does, because if he had you would have given him credit for being a programmer and acknowledged that his application is complicated. I wonder how long it took your father to create that application with FileMaker. I would like to see how long it would take you to code it "from scratch" using your favorite "real" programming system.

__david__ 12y ago
> If he wrote it in a 'real' programming (textual) computer language you might have written that differently. You might have written "technical but not really a programmer" or something. I wrote it the way I did because it's more nuanced than that. My dad can program. He's written assembly and knows some C. But he's not a programmer by trade—he's a hardware guy.