4 ms·

Some people used to call HyperTalk “Visual COBOL”

Animats 12y ago
Yes. You can write statements which are both valid HyperTalk and COBOL. This is not a good thing. It went downhill from there: Put field 2 of card 54 into field 5 of card 71 You could name fields, but it went visibly slower if you did. There's visual programing, where you drag boxes around and connect them. This comes back every few years. Simple examples look great. Larger program are awful. Blender, the animation system, has a game development system like that. Programs are single huge, messy wiring diagrams. Programming requires lots of zooming and scrolling. There's a reason that IC designers gave up schematics for VHDL.
- raintrees 12y ago
  Borland's ObjectVision had me jump into a rabbit hole for awhile, until I retreated back into (pre-Visual) FoxPro, as I kept running into limitations of the ObjectVision language.
- jcl 12y ago
  If you want to see programming-as-carefully-formatted-English taken to the extreme, check out Inform 7, a system for writing interactive fiction. For example, here is the complete source of a game: http://inform7.com/learn/eg/glass/source.txt http://inform7.com/learn/eg/glass/source.txt
  - rspeer 12y ago
    Anyone remember the cryptic document that _why posted in the form of a printer spool [1], years after his disappearance from programming? It was a sort of fictional, surrealist autobiography. [1] http://www.scribd.com/doc/136875051/why-s-complete-printer-spool-as-one-book http://www.scribd.com/doc/136875051/why-s-complete-printer-s... I was grinning madly when I noticed -- in the part where he's exploring an island -- the page written in syntactically valid Inform 7.
- e12e 12y ago
  Assuming: > Put field 2 of card 54 into field 5 of card 71 Means (Pascalish pseudocode): > Card71[5] := card54[2] Or, perhaps a likely C adoption: > cards[71][5] = cards[54][2] I'm not so sure I think your example demonstrate how "bad" this is.

Yes. You can write statements which are both valid HyperTalk and COBOL. This is not a good thing. It went downhill from there: Put field 2 of card 54 into field 5 of card 71 You could name fields, but it went visibly slower if you did. There's visual programing, where you drag boxes around and connect them. This comes back every few years. Simple examples look great. Larger program are awful. Blender, the animation system, has a game development system like that. Programs are single huge, messy wiring diagrams. Programming requires lots of zooming and scrolling. There's a reason that IC designers gave up schematics for VHDL.

raintrees 12y ago
Borland's ObjectVision had me jump into a rabbit hole for awhile, until I retreated back into (pre-Visual) FoxPro, as I kept running into limitations of the ObjectVision language.
jcl 12y ago
If you want to see programming-as-carefully-formatted-English taken to the extreme, check out Inform 7, a system for writing interactive fiction. For example, here is the complete source of a game: http://inform7.com/learn/eg/glass/source.txt http://inform7.com/learn/eg/glass/source.txt
- rspeer 12y ago
  Anyone remember the cryptic document that _why posted in the form of a printer spool [1], years after his disappearance from programming? It was a sort of fictional, surrealist autobiography. [1] http://www.scribd.com/doc/136875051/why-s-complete-printer-spool-as-one-book http://www.scribd.com/doc/136875051/why-s-complete-printer-s... I was grinning madly when I noticed -- in the part where he's exploring an island -- the page written in syntactically valid Inform 7.
e12e 12y ago
Assuming: > Put field 2 of card 54 into field 5 of card 71 Means (Pascalish pseudocode): > Card71[5] := card54[2] Or, perhaps a likely C adoption: > cards[71][5] = cards[54][2] I'm not so sure I think your example demonstrate how "bad" this is.