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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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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Agree, but affordances provided by blocks can be better than those provided by plain text. Also, what do you think of visual environments that overlay data in the right places, e.g. this just came out:https://twitter.com/LamduProject/status/1055914924780720129 …
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I try to expose both data and code at
@instadeq see time traveling tracing with data, code and intermediate values all visible:https://twitter.com/instadeq/status/1041677628321804288 …
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you're looking at the wrong visual languages. things like blockly and scratch are not useful and completely the wrong direction. however, things like labview and touchdesigner are extremely useful and do show you the data, sometimes much more so than text-based languages.
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Agreed. My typical justification is like: so fundamentally programs are about transforming data—right? And programming is about describing how some data should be transformed. Would it not be useful to be able to watch how these descriptions are actually transforming the data?
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