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I love this progression and think it's exactly right for high school and entry college programs. Conceptually when do people think is the right time to switch

I love this progression and think it's exactly right for high school and entry college programs. Conceptually when do people think is the right time to switch from one of these visually languages (optimized for asthetic and visual approachability) across to text based coding? What key 'ah ha' moments for the new student define when they are ready to cross over?

jherritz 11y ago
I'm confident that is still an open question. That said, the creator of Snap would probably say there is no need to transition - ever. All Snap code can be viewed and edited as text. It's not an either/or decision, in other words.
analog31 11y ago
I think the cross-over occurs when the graphical language becomes too cumbersome due to ergonomics or readability. I have only seen two graphical languages -- Scratch and LabVIEW. I think that these languages may be easier to learn, but are not more readable than text based languages, and vastly less ergonomic. To this day, my eyeballs and carpal tunnels ache just thinking about LabVIEW. My guess is that the corresponding ah-ha moment is when programs grow to where they depend on the benefits of modularity.
- striking 11y ago
  LabVIEW makes the syntactic stuff a lot easier, but as soon as you want a modular program or you want to create something polished, it stops working the way you want it to. And I'd argue that it's because LabVIEW is meant only for R&D purposes. It does work fairly well for FPGA-based applications but that's often because those programs are fairly compact and uncomplicated when done right. I wish there were a more modular and useful version of LabVIEW (or G or whatever the language is called) because I'd like to use something like that. Not having to worry about execution order is a marvelous thing, and it really transforms the way one thinks.
  - analog31 11y ago
    Agreed. I used LV for some R&D stuff, many years ago. More recently, I became responsible for a product whose support software had been written in LV -- by a guy who was certified as a LV expert -- and the code was impenetrable.
- bloaf 11y ago
  Lego mindstorms had (has?) a visual programming language as well.
  - analog31 11y ago
    Somebody told me it's based on LabVIEW.
- pjmlp 11y ago
  OutSystems also uses visual representations for the web sites.

jherritz 11y ago

I'm confident that is still an open question. That said, the creator of Snap would probably say there is no need to transition - ever. All Snap code can be viewed and edited as text. It's not an either/or decision, in other words.

analog31 11y ago

I think the cross-over occurs when the graphical language becomes too cumbersome due to ergonomics or readability. I have only seen two graphical languages -- Scratch and LabVIEW. I think that these languages may be easier to learn, but are not more readable than text based languages, and vastly less ergonomic. To this day, my eyeballs and carpal tunnels ache just thinking about LabVIEW. My guess is that the corresponding ah-ha moment is when programs grow to where they depend on the benefits of modularity.

striking 11y ago
LabVIEW makes the syntactic stuff a lot easier, but as soon as you want a modular program or you want to create something polished, it stops working the way you want it to. And I'd argue that it's because LabVIEW is meant only for R&D purposes. It does work fairly well for FPGA-based applications but that's often because those programs are fairly compact and uncomplicated when done right. I wish there were a more modular and useful version of LabVIEW (or G or whatever the language is called) because I'd like to use something like that. Not having to worry about execution order is a marvelous thing, and it really transforms the way one thinks.
- analog31 11y ago
  Agreed. I used LV for some R&D stuff, many years ago. More recently, I became responsible for a product whose support software had been written in LV -- by a guy who was certified as a LV expert -- and the code was impenetrable.
bloaf 11y ago
Lego mindstorms had (has?) a visual programming language as well.
- analog31 11y ago
  Somebody told me it's based on LabVIEW.
pjmlp 11y ago
OutSystems also uses visual representations for the web sites.