3 ms·

What if we could just *draw* the code?

• dalke 12y ago
  That has been a dream since at least Sutherland's 1962 PhD thesis. Many have tried. It works for a few niches, mostly dealing with data flow. Besides LabView there's Quartz Composer on the Mac, and Yahoo Pipes, so it's not like it's an exotic solution. No one has managed to come up with one which is an effective general purpose language on par with the more text-oriented ones.
  • JoeAltmaier 12y ago
    Never mind drawing it. I want to specify it. Not with wads of text, but with definitions that I could put in a database and granularly track. Declarations, members, singletons, resources, all of it in a form that tools can understand. Because source control has negligible semantic knowledge, so does a terrible job of integrating code. Text files tangle up stuff that should be easily distinguished by tools but isn't.
    • dalke 12y ago
      How is that different than what CASE tools provide? Or an image-based language like Smalltalk?