Nardi (1993) points out that it's actually pretty rare for people to have issues with the text syntax of spreadsheet formulas: https://books.google.com/books?id=0drDRT370eoC&pg=PA49 …pic.twitter.com/cQXLCsGI7l
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Nardi (1993) points out that it's actually pretty rare for people to have issues with the text syntax of spreadsheet formulas: https://books.google.com/books?id=0drDRT370eoC&pg=PA49 …pic.twitter.com/cQXLCsGI7l
Our tools for editing text are pretty good; also, our hardware (keyboards, high-dpi displays) is adapted to it, so it might be a local maximum it's also great that you can edit text 'out of order' & go through invalid states while getting to your ultimate correct program
Rather than blindly getting rid of text, make the right formal language and representation for the user's interests. People can be _great_ at learning languages: there's no reason a formal or textual language has to be 'programming' with all its connotationspic.twitter.com/Ud8WByxnX8
related is Bret's 'show the data'; block-based 'visual' programming is about showing (the same old) code as blocks, not about 1. showing the data or 2. having a better code for users' interestspic.twitter.com/4eEu4X6Su6
also, from the mundane engineering perspective, it's an incredible pain to build a visual environment, compared to just writing a compiler or interpreter routine. huge state space and input space + lots of UI code -> harder to iterate and prototype tool ideas
You should check out Rhino3d/Grasshopper! It’s a really great graphical programming language for architects/designers, very much used in design practice. (Aka: not a toy language)pic.twitter.com/x2vV7paEfS
Yeah, it seems like the 'node dataflow' kind of visual programming has a much better record; I also hear good things about Quartz Composer, etc
A majority of the visual programing tools were marketing gimmicks. I know I worked on one, Visual Age Smalltalk. And I have seen some truly spaghetti code.
spaghetti code is not a result of the medium. it exists in both visual and textual languages. one can even argue that since visual languages show more structure and relationships between code pieces that it does a better job of showing poor code structuring than text languages.
text-only programs lack a dimension. you can't see the actual flow of data through your program. visual dataflow languages, like labview, give you this. i am convinced that a hybrid approach is generally required but practically zero work is done along these lines.
spreadsheets fucking ruuuuuule. also watching someone operate a spreadsheet is pretty followable
But spreadsheets are the most successful kind of visual programming! The text in the formulas is not a problem precisely because the rest of the program is visual, keeping the text short!
formal text-based languages sound like they'd be intimidating, but have people studied the actual difficulties with learning the conceptual framework of programming? (IME people who aren't already familiar with it have a hard time with variables - but spreadsheets solve this)
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