I'm skeptical of visual programming, especially the most obvious 'blocks instead of text syntax' type. Spreadsheets use a formal, text-based language -- and end users learn spreadsheets fine!
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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
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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
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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
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I agree that editing programs (semi)textually is a more fluid experience which is a good thing. But we should not store programs as text files, as that makes rich hybrid (textual + visual) notations practically impossible to implement!
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Storing programs as text also makes it impossible to store the intent of the edit actions performed by the user. Collaborative editing and version merging then work poorly as they have to guess the user's intent using heuristics like line-based diff.
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The keyboard is an equally efficient input method for blocks. The math formula editor in Lyx is a good example for that -- it is a keyboard-operated structural editor for math.
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Our tools for editing text do much more than editing text. Part of what makes them good (like autocompletion, go-to-definition etc.) actually could work even better in block based languages.
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Text is a local maximum for low-dpi, non-bitmapped displays. Today we can afford hybrid visual-textual forms of presentation -- that could be the new local optimum.
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I came here to add this comment about hardware optimizing for certain interaction patterns.
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