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threefour | 8 years ago

Imagine a world where people only bought bespoke suits. You go to a tailor and are measured and pick out your fabric and wait a few weeks. Then you pick up your suit. It's perfect. You pay $5000 and take it home.

Most of us don't do that. Most of us make due with off the rack suits with some tailoring for 1/10th the price.

With programming we have an expectation of bespoke design, so anything less, even if it's much easier, seems lame.

A potentially useful reframing of the question is, "What are all the common use cases that could be solved sufficiently with significantly less effort using visual programming?"

discuss

order

dsjoerg|8 years ago

you win the prize for asking the right question. the answers are like with AI, where once it's done in a certain domain, then that's not AI anymore. that is, with visual programming, once it's done in a particular domain, people don't think it's programming anymore.

the big examples i have in mind are: * spreadsheets -- very visual, everything's in a grid. the relationships are spatial. * electronic music -- people lay out their various effects in a flowchart format and chain them from one to another * video games -- consider a game like RimWorld. you're clicking on all kinds of things and specifying what you want done with them. the behavior of the actors in the environment are modified by your specifications.

So, it's all in various optimized subdomains. As it should be!

kig|8 years ago

And who could forget the most successful visual programming tool of them all: Photoshop. A relatively simple visual programming language for putting together programs that generate images of various kinds.

Most of the things you do are achieved through a visual programming environment specialised for that particular task. Maybe text-based source files in complex directory trees, managed through a structured text editor with UI composition helpers represents one kind of specialised visual programming environment as well.

majewsky|8 years ago

Sooo... Minecraft is a visual programming tool, then?

dkuebric|8 years ago

Agreed. There are a lot of good points in this thread about why visual programming falls short for general purpose computing. However, I would argue that it already has a firm foothold in select domains such as presentations (powerpoint).