Comment by anigbrowl | Hacker News Reader

Comment by anigbrowl | Hacker News Reader

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Personally I like diagrammatic programming, most often seen for signal processing workflows in VFX or audio synthesis. My favorite platform from a design pov is a robotics IDE now called Flowstone. It's based around ruby iirc; in an earlier version you could also write modules in C or assembler. http://www.dsprobotics.com/flowstone.html

There are upsides an downsides to this paradigm of course; one downside is that it's not obvious how to read control flows at first. On the upside, having all your functions available in modular form makes if far easier to explore and program using high-level concepts. What I hate about conventional programming is all the typing and having to remember all the function parameters, calling conventions etc., I want the computer to do that for me. Writing code in an IDE is about as enticing as making my own Lego bricks from scratch.

Yeah,

I would agree that diagrammatic programming is a process that inherently seems like it would solve the opaqueness of programming.

But I'd say this paradigm is just as much inherently limited and not useful for "serious" work. This is because the multitude of "parts" that a computer program has exist in too large a space to be visually represented and because the details don't really follow our intuits for two or three dimensional objects.

I wouldn't know if URI diagrams are (still?) used heavily in industry, but they are taught. Those work architectural, or generative but limited.

I agree with you, but to play devil's advocate: isn't the purpose of an IDE to keep you from having to remember parameters and stuff like that? Autocomplete?

IDEs turn textual languages into quasi graphical languages. E.g. a porthole showing a symbol's references across the project, where you can seamlessly edit the code in some distant file somewhere. Or when a bulky Java object is collapsed down to look like a lambda. Autocomplete, too, is getting graphical with icons and tabs.

Unfortunately they're still constrained by the language itself being designed around text. A lot more could be done with a language+IDE developed in tandem, with the IDE's needs always taking precedence in decisions.

Modularity and dynamic typing are not unique to the visual editors like you describe (my limited experience was with labview).

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