"My biggest contribution so far at Google has been Blockly."
Nice - https://developers.google.com/blockly/ no real fan of google, but the tools and code churned out by individuals there is pretty interesting. This I will play with.
Nice - https://developers.google.com/blockly/ no real fan of google, but the tools and code churned out by individuals there is pretty interesting. This I will play with.
You are right.
It looks horrible and cluttered and could be made better. Though visuals and design aside, the idea is sound. There is a real barrier b/w textual/visual in software. You don't see this in other physical disciplines like EE.
It would be interesting to have a better (easier to read, standardised etc.) version of these flow charts. Not impossible and possibly easier to trace, explain and see alternatives/improvements in design.
I'm not so sure "it could be made better".
That's not to say I think it's a lost cause: I think it works great for short, 5-10 line programs. Once programs grow larger it becomes very hard to reason with, like with most VPLs.
[0] https://scratch.mit.edu/ [1] https://code.org [2] https://www.gethopscotch.com/ [3] https://www.tynker.com/ [4] http://stencyl.com/
Interesting comments. I'm not sure about the failure on larger programs. The idea of these visual languages is to allow different learning styles and a quicker way to absorb the program details into your head. The best understood programs are the ones we can hold in our heads.
Yet it isn't too hard a visual problem to show complex situations graphically. You do this with scale. EEs manage to show complex logic in circuit diagrams (and other diagrams for states) so I see no reason why more complex programs cannot be shown graphically. (cf: background in technical graphics/cartography/gis/programming).
The biggest limitation is the way programmers think. They convert textual code and parse it in their head. Aside from logic diagrams, flow charts (and others) I don't think 4GL programs have really taken off because the source code is the most efficient way to write, read and show software.
When it comes to graphics programmers don't natively grok graphics as they do text and shun such tools. I've noticed that I have to switch modes of thinking text when programming, then graphical for other things. It's a hard thing to do and the precision of programming breaks my ability to visualise and draw.
The scaling idea is simple. You have blocks of code that are represented as Blocky. As you look at more aspects of the program, you scale out and see a smaller scale view of the code represented visually. You do this with maps all the time. The complexity of the data is orders of magnitudes of the landscape is more complex with respect to software. You zoom in and out of the landscape as needed to understand, measure or picture the lay of the land.
The key thing I get from this is the union of primarily textual programmers to people wishing to visually understand has a shallow overlap.
Unfortunately, it seems like VPLs only work well for well-defined domains (say, a VPL for shaders, a VPL for compositing, a VPL for EE, a VPL for business logic)
Once you try to go general, and add "zooming in" and "zooming out" mappings, the number of ways that people would prefer to visualize each becomes exponentially more complex to display/interact with; so much so that then simply using text seems like a general-enough solution.
I'm still hopeful that a general purpose VPL could exist and work for 'real' programs, but so far my search has come up empty.
A good reference list to look at for existing VPLs:
http://blog.interfacevision.com/design/design-visual-progarm...
Thanks for this insight. Agree with "text is good-enough". The link is like a list of approaches not to take. IFTTT, minecraft and openmusic appear to do the job.
The problem I'm thinking of is creating geometry using a combination of GUI manipulation -> geometry ->code to allow tweaking for n00bs, straight code -> geometry with GUI manipulation. These examples really help.
I missed/mis-understood this bit. I think of the visual side as another slice of how code is constructed/works/understood. I've limited experience of VCL (windstorms) and thought it was terribly clunky, got out an editor and used text.
Visual coding has a place in geometric construction. This has to do with feedback maybe less so on understanding code.
From the about page: One of the limitations of Scratch as a language for computer science education is that its lists are not first class, so you can’t have a list of lists. Making lists first class is enough of an extension to Scratch to allow the creation of any other data structures (trees, heaps, hash tables, dictionaries, and so on) in user-defined Snap! code, implemented as lists of lists. via https://snap.berkeley.edu/about.html
Take even the smallest snippet:
while (Count <= 3) {
To you or me, this is pretty obvious. I've had kids ask me questions I'd never have thought of because I know this stuff already:
* What do the parentheses mean? * What is Count, is it a Javascript thing? * Is Count being set to 3? (<= looks like an arrow, not necessarily less than or equal to) * What is that squiggle? (meaning the '{') * Is this a program?
I'm with you, the Blockly stuff is hardly legible to me. But to kids learning this for the first time, I can tell you from first hand experience the color/shape/block aspect makes a huge difference.
A simple for-loop can be complicated.
First, they need to understand that a for-loop instantiates a variable (i). Then they need to understand that the next step is a limit: i < something. And then they need to understand that i++ means increment i every time that the below code is run.
Nevermind that it makes more sense to go: i = 0, i = I + 1, i < something, that's how it works.
Of course if they don't get that, they may not be cut out for programming. But its far from intuitive.