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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The first compilers were massive risky projects. The first IDEs were Herculean efforts. It’s always easier to tweak the well-known than to explore new ideas
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agree! I bring up the difficulty because 1. need to factor it into cost-benefit -- you'd better have a lot of potential upside for it to be worth making blocks instead of text code 2. maybe solving this engineering difficulty problem => unlock more progress in programming UX
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Blocks are getting pretty civilized, i.e. Blockly. But yeah, to explore further, you had best not be betting your career. Confession: I'm falling back to syntax for a while just so I can make faster progress.
End of conversation
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From the mundane engineering perspective it's an incredible pain to build a visual *anything*. Fairly reasonable solutions addressed previously go largely unnoticed: Garnet/Amulet, Unidraw, HotDraw, Scheme2C's EZDraw, also toward visual languages: http://www.dsc.ufcg.edu.br/~jacques/cursos/map/html/frame/evolve.html …
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this is one of the main reasons they fail too: it just so much harder to create a non-buggy visual editor than an equally expressive text based one.
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this is a good point! it is why I am trying to build reusable libraries for non-traditional UIs as part of my work right now. so far, it is going "ok".
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Yes, but pain(text) < pain(visual+autocompletion and stuff) << pain(text+autocompletion and stuff). I am writing a structural editor in TypeScript+MobX+React and it is a rather pleasant experience.
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