Hacker News Reader

Comment by cm2187 | Hacker News Reader

I am curious who is the target audience. I find that visual programming tends to address a very narrow audience of people who are ready to invest a lot of time to learn a tool, but will not learn simple syntax like sql or python.

View on HN

Pretty sure "Blueprints" by Unreal Engine is a visual programming tool used by a lot of people that know the syntax of various programming languages but still use it because the iteration time is a lot better than the C++ counterpart, as well as less verbose, or/and to avoid all the strict typing needed in that language.

I was curious what the blueprints looked like and did a google image search for screenshots of them. It brought up a unity forum post that does not make them look very palatable.

https://forum.unity.com/threads/unreal-engine-5-game-changer...

Blueprints allow for functions and Macros where you can encapsulate a lot of logic in a single graphical node, as well as grouping/labeling, so no, clean Blueprints don't look like that at all.

Screenshots can't make it justice anyway, because one of the main benefits of using Blueprints is to watch the logic and events flow in real time as you play/debug the game (represented as tiny marching circles)

Here is an interesting talk in this matter of organizing blueprints (52 min): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mW0IlgjF-iw

It is the usual monoliths with lack of proper modular programing practices, only applied to visual programming.

Maybe it is time to start doing microservices in visual programming languages. /s

National Instruments LabVIEW is another example of graphical programming.

https://www.ni.com/en-no/shop/labview.html

LabVIEW is not appealing to me. But I know people and companies that swear by it.

We should admit that even though we may not like all examples of graphical programming that we’ve seen, there are a lot of people out there successfully relying on graphical programming to get their work done.

I continue to think that there may be graphical programming tools out there that may appeal to me also. Haven’t tried OP tool yet but maybe I will like it.

There are some tools that work in similar ways that I like, such as for example the nodes editor in Blender.

I worked with LabVIEW extensively between 2014-2016. Its not the best programming experience, but in some domains it was the only option. Our lab had some high end instruments and the only drivers were provided by NI.

Yeah I love function block programming for control systems.

Node-red?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com