We dislike UML and visual stuff. I want to make something different/better
kickstarter.com
kickstarter.com
My problem: UML stuff and Data-flow programming as in Unreal's Blueprint are useless. Aspect oriented programming was also kind of messy and so ended up nowhere.
My Answer: I want to make a difference. Have you ever used a GUI app for Git? Well, why can't we represent those patches as "parameterised" visual components or blocks and eliminate the need for them being "sequential"!?
This is exactly what I am suggesting in http://www.TaggedProgramming.com and exactly what I want to create with SourceCreator.
At this stage, it's just a simple template based text processor. It plugs bits of code into other bits of code - in a dumb way. But I want to make a clever one in Clang/LLVM as well.
This is like a little GUI and Text based wizard to help us deal with some stuff quicker and to focus more on what matters.
What do you think?
UML standards are being extended to make possible "executable UML" and although the average UML tool sucks, there are people realizing much of the Model Driven Dream using kit from certain vendors.
The data-flow stuff is definitely not useless: do you know how many engineers and experimental physicists use LabView? Data-flow tools are also efficient at parallel execution, thus you have people who are great at marketing and geospatial thinking who can create "Expert Systems." From a front-end application it is a simple server call to run the things they wrote to make business decisions.
Scratch is the one visual programming system everybody loves and it is worth imitating. In particular it is good for writing programs of the procedural variey.
Years ago I used a web-app construction toolkit called Tango where instead of writing code like PHP you stack up a lot of blocks like Scratch.
Tango was not that bad. It did not stay up to date with modern thinking about how to make webapps, but it was workable, people really built apps with it.