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- Hacker News
- Oh dear. I think they may fall over in surprise when they realize that this technology become commercially viable while they were busy writing this academic paper...by conartist6
- Can you elaborate?by lukan
- I mean visual programming is standard in game development. Did not get traction in the rest of the dev community.
Now it does not matter anyways. We are not reading/ writing code anymore. Just specifying it and testing it.
by whatever1 - I feel it would be remiss of me not to mention the humble TempleOS support for mixing code and sprites. I can't say I've ever used the system myself, but its DolDoc format [0] offered some pretty nifty features for directly interspersing sprites into source code viewable together as one. You can see some screenshots on the hackmag page [1] under the section that reads: "If that’s not enough to impress you, open any game file and behold the unthinkable: the sprites are embedded right in the code!"
0) https://tinkeros.github.io/WbTempleOS/Doc/DolDocOverview.htm... 1) https://hackmag.com/security/templeos
by cml123 - I work daily in TouchDesigner and am constantly wrestling with the integration of its node and Python scripting contexts. In particular order of operations, delegation of responsibility, and store of state are very unsolved areas when expressing intent across both domains.
- https://bsky.app/profile/watwa.re/post/3lizpdz34522g
I'm working on a similar idea, it's been a while since I published about it but open to input and collabs!
by gr__or - We have the complete AST in almost every IDE. Why are we not learning to render abstracted code and systems from that??by michael-ax
- because it's unusable in practice. It's fun as an idea and as a toy, but when you try to use such a visual system to do work, you quickly realise that text is way more flexible and simpler to operate on.by delegate
- So cool! Love that Clojure(Script) is the language of choice here. Seeing a graphical tile nestled in a function call blew my mind for a hot minute, there.by summarybot
- Related research: Elliot Evans' Polytope (https://elliot.website/editor/).by Twey
- Hm...the screenshots don't really sell it;
Maybe the authors should just vibe code a cljs port and put it in a browser?
And showcase some program written in this language that sells it better?
by Garlef - Yes, I think the best avenue for exploration in this space would be to start with literate programming tools like Jupyter notebooks or Observable.
https://new.observablehq.com/@observablehq/notebooks-2-0-sys...
- Visual languages often fail when it comes to concurrent development where the state of the art is textual diff and merge. The IBM Rational suite attempted visual model diff/merge but I recall it being unworkable in practice.
Modern collaborative visual tools like Miro sidestep the concurrent development problem by being live multiplayer and by essentially having no version management at all.
Most visual BPM tools that I'm aware of try to mix flowchart style programming with e.g. Javascript on activity nodes, but they fail provide any developer-time syntax checking or completion. They also tend to serialise to XML which is unworkable in practice for diff/merge of the visual logic.
In a previous job we developed an in-house flowchart based language that embedded Javascript. We put the effort into writing a first-class Eclipse plugin that had syntax checking and completion across all graphical and Javascript constructs. It even had interactive debugging that interleaved graphical and textual single-stepping. We never solved the diff/merge problem in a satisfactory way.
- for a long time I've believed that the way to bridge the visual and the textual worlds is to generate the visuals from a plain text source of truth. I've never gone so far as to make a visually editable programming language, but I have done multiple projects where, for example, process diagrams in an IDEF0 style were generated from human readable text propositions of the form:
Prepare Meal is a Process Oven enables Prepare Meal Utensils enable Prepare Meal Prepare Meal transforms Raw Ingredients Prepare Meal produces Finished Meal Menu governs Prepare Meal Customer Order governs Prepare Meal
You can map out a business process using a very simple (and XML-free, and diffable) plain text DSL and generate interactive diagrams from it. My most recent example is for concept maps along similar lines.
by james_ross - Every to often a project will come along which reminds me of the visions which Hermann Hesse's _The Glass Bead Game_ (originally published as _Magister Ludi_) inspired in me --- this looks to be the latest.
Looking forward to reading the paper and hope that it is widely read/discussed, and that it influences projects/developers such as: https://www.inkandswitch.com/
I'd dearly love to see a 3D CAD program which used this methodology.
by WillAdams - SikuliX was a UI automation tool from over a decade ago with an IDE that looked similar to their screenshots: https://avleonov.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/script_windo...
The language was just python and the IDE swapped out certain functions' arguments with the image and targets within the image that the code referred to. It also had a bunch of built-in functionality that let you manipulate the images and targets (the little red crosses in that screenshot) directly within the IDE instead of having to edit the underlying python code.
Looks like it has a successor called Oculix but I know nothing about that.
by Izkata - That's interesting. The most I had to do with SikuliX recently is its Robot Framework library, which is very neat way of both keeping the tech somewhat alive and making it easier to write the scripts.by adamhepner
- A very long time ago I wrote an Eclipse plug in that would read from source comments an ascii diagram describing the state/transition flow of a java class object, and generate/update the necessary state fields and transition methods.
It was pretty cool in principle but nearly unworkable in practice, purely because maintaining an ascii diagram in a text editor for anything more than "Hello world" is a massive PITA.
The simple text editor has a lot to answer for when it comes to how we think about programming, in a Sapir-Whorf kind of way. It's a shame there has been no cast iron standard for mixing live text and visuals. Our industry might look very different.
by kitd - > The simple text editor has a lot to answer for when it comes to how we think about programming
I wonder whether those that used punch cards said the same about those punch cards?
It’s weird how our mobile devices aren’t programmed using keyboards/text as input devices. Or our microwaves. Or refrigerators.
Programmers are stuck with text because their programming paradigms are stuck in a text-based paradigm, hence AIs spew out reams and reams of simple to understand text.
There is definite room for improvements and room for keyboards. However the focus should move on from keyboard to mouse to XR environments using 3D glasses. Our programming paradigms have to move aswell.
Using a visual first paradigm means using higher level constructs, things such as Blockly from Google isn’t a good example of visual programming. For music, things such as noisecraft are. For more general programming approach, Node-RED is a good example of visual programming based on flow based programming paradigm which is well suited to visual programming.
by Towaway69