Comment by dyarosla | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dyarosla | Hacker News Reader

Pros

The author well formulates the limitations of VPLs (Visual programming languages).

Cons

The rant seems to jumble in VPLs for general purpose programming with VPLs for domain-specific usecases. So although VPLs may be "a bad idea" for general purpose computing and does a good job of explaining its downsides, it is a little reckless in saying VPLs are a bad idea overall.

The author also offers two straw man arguments to make their point, though I don't believe that these things are common misconceptions at all:

1) Abstraction and decoupling play a small and peripheral part in programming.

2) The tools that have been developed to support programming are unimportant.

Lastly, the author uses Scratch as its representative VPL example, even though it is probably the most far removed from "Visual Programming" and more in line with something I'd call "Block-Based Programming". These are far from equivalent and a poor choice to use for talking about general purpose VPLs (though the author does admit that it may have been a poor choice later).

Arrays and Objects and trees and everything else in an AST (including the AST itself) are shapes.

Shapes are better built with our hands. They're often filled with text, which is more easily said than written.

Someone can already use a visual programming language to simulate the ocean in UE4 in 2018, in 20 years we'll have a mainstream general purpose visual programming language. More people might be using a visual programming language to make their AST than a keyboard, which is as comparatively cumbersome to gestures/talking as punchcards are to keyboards.

UE4 blueprints are an example of a domain-specific VPL that I've mentioned above (a good example of where VPLs can work great). They however do not solve the problem of working with abstractions well- UE4 blueprints are akin to, how the author put it, "property dialogue programming".

So far, any attempts to model abstractions for general purpose VPLs have ended up more difficult to parse and read than textual code (that argument can also be made for UE4 Blueprints[0]).

Talking about "shapes are better built with our hands" isn't a solid argument for why general purpose VPLs are bound to happen. Note, too, that I would love for them to.

[0] https://blueprintsfromhell.tumblr.com/)

Sorry, why isn't it a solid argument? I'm imagining building an AST representation that looks like our current one, since there's less abstraction, but using our hands and voice. Optimising the appearance can come later.

Alan Kay wrote some interesting stuff about some of the inspirations for "Tile-" and "Block-Based Programming", like "Thinkin' Things", in a discussion about the Snap! visual programming language!

https://snap.berkeley.edu

From: Alan Kay Date: Thu, 3 May 2018 07:49:16 +0000 (UTC) Subject: Re: Blocky + Micropolis = Blockropolis! ;)

Yes, all of these "blocks" editors sprouted from the original one I designed for Etoys* more than 20 years ago now -- most of the followup was by way of Jens Moenig -- who did SNAP. You can see Etoys demoed on the OLPC in my 2007 TED talk.

I'd advise coming up with a special kid's oriented language for your SimCity/Metropolis system and then render it in "blocks".

Cheers

Alan

------------- * Two precursors for DnD programming were in my grad student's -- Mike Travers -- MIT thesis (not quite the same idea), and in the "Thinking Things" parade programming system (again, just individual symbol blocks rather than expressions).

----

From: Don Hopkins Date: Fri, 4 May 2018 00:43:56 +0200 Subject: Re: Blocky + Micropolis = Blockropolis! ;)

I love fondly remember and love Thinkin’ Things 1, but I never saw the subsequent versions!

But there’s a great demo on youtube! https://youtu.be/gCFNUc10Vu8?t=24m58s

That would be a great way to program SimCity builder “agents” like the bulldozer and road layer, as well as agents like PacMan who know how to follow roads and eat traffic!

I am trying to get my head around Snap by playing around with it and watching Jens’s youtube videos, and it’s dawning on me that that it’s full blown undiluted Scheme with continuations and visual macros plus the best ideas of Squeak! The concept of putting a “ring” around blocks to make them a first class function, and being able to define your own custom blocks that take bodies of block code as parameters like real Lisp macros is brilliant! That is what I’ve been dreaming about and wondering how to do for so long! Looks like he nailed it! ;)

Here’s something I found that you wrote about tile programming six years ago.

-Don

Squeak-dev:

http://squeak-dev.squeakfoundation.narkive.com/7ZN0H3vt/etoy....

Etoys, Alice and tile programming ajbn at cin.ufpe.br () 6 years ago

Folks,

I have been trying the new version of Alice <www.alice.org>. It also uses tile programming like Etoys.Just for curiosity, does anyone know the history of Tile Programming? TIA,

Antonio Barros PhD Student Informatics Center Federal University of Pernambuco Brazil

Alan Kay 6 years ago

This particular strand starting with one of the projects I saw in the CDROM "Thinking Things" (I think it was the 3rd in the set). This project was basically about being able to march around a football field and the multiple marchers were controlled by a very simple tile based programming system. Also, a grad student from a number of years ago, Mike Travers, did a really excellent thesis at MIT about enduser programming of autonomous agents -- the system was called AGAR -- and many of these ideas were used in the Vivarium project at Apple 15 years ago. The thesis version of AGAR used DnD tiles to make programs in Mike's very powerful system.

The etoys originated as a design I did to make a nice constructive environment for the internet -- the Disney Family.com site -- in which small projects could make by parents and kids working together. SqC made the etoys ideas work, and Kim Rose and teacher BJ Conn decided to see how they would work in a classroom. I thought the etoys lacked too many features to be really good in a classroom, but I was wrong. The small number of features and the ease of use turned out to be real virtues.

We've been friends with Randy Pausch for a long time and have had a number of outstanding interns from his group at CMU over the years. For example, Jeff Pierce (now a prof at GaTech) did SqueakAlice working with Andreas Raab to tie it to Andreas' Balloon3D. Randy's group got interested in the etoys tile scripting and did a very nice variant (it's rather different from etoys, and maybe better).

Cheers,

Alan

Reply on news.ycombinator.com