Hacker News Reader

Comment by Existenceblinks | Hacker News Reader

Fun read. I would love to read what if it's not text based, is it going to be different? Visual programming seems to suffer from composability and it's also bounded to be using human language as well, box with border is hard to comprehend, can get messy easily.

I mean, visual but text-like theme. It seems to be in sweat spot. Only fix some downside/limit of text.

View on HN

Shameless plug for my hybrid visual/text pl, Pickcode, which matches what you're talking about

Demo programs: https://app.pickcode.io/playground

Wow this is awesome, love this style. I did something really similar with our game's scripting language called MBScript: https://docs.modboxgame.com/docs/mbscript Same kind of line setup, visual add button, etc.

Whats Pickcode made for? Web programming?

Pickcode is meant for K-12 education as an alternative to block programming. The end goal is to have a WYSIWG editor for web apps with behavior defined using the visual programming language.

MBScript looks great and I’d love to talk about your learnings from it. My contact is on the pickcode.io landing page if you want to chat!

Hey, yes! Nice, I'm thinking more serious and ambitious. You could go mass by adding "module" and ways to compose. The keyboard navigation is ok-ish (honest opinion) because this is the hardest ones which is design for every day task in long run, at minimum should be as fast as text based programming. At least 3-4 devs are comfortable to work on this codebase (non-realtime, just normal version branching flow)

I really really want this decades old idea to take off. We should have grammar files in .. json is fine (have to start somewhere), and have spec for editor implementor to spread it across platforms. Ideally languages creators only have to customize "view" to decide how their lang would look like. Probably configure keymaps if they think their lang can be developed fast with certain keystroke (akin to emacs but more friendly because medium is not text anymore)

You could check out Self. It’s image-based so the objects are “live”, and can be interacted with directly via the UI.

Is it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CCx6Nj_Hr1g ? I've seen quite many live programming languages. Though not a single one seems to want to go mass. Like able to have at least a 3-4 devs team work on it.

> Is it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CCx6Nj_Hr1g ?

Yes.

> I've seen quite many live programming languages.

I have no idea what that means.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com