Comment by Duanemclemore | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Duanemclemore | Hacker News Reader

I'm going to throw a vote in here for Grasshopper, the visual programming language in Rhino3d as doing it the right way. It is WIDELY used in architectural education and practice alike.

Unfortunately, most visuals you'll get of the populated canvas online are crap. And for those of us who make extremely clean readable programs it's kind of a superpower and we tend to be careful with how widely we spread them. But once you see a good one you get the value immediately.

Here's a good simple program I made, as a sample. [0]

Also, I want to give a shout-out to the Future of Coding community in this. The Whole Code Catalog [1] and Ivan Reese's Visual Programming Codex [2] are great resources in the area.

I also have to mention, despite the awful name, Flowgorithm is an EXCELLENT tool for teaching the fundamentals of procedural thinking. [3] One neat thing is you can switch between the flow chart view and the script code view in something like 35 different languages natively (or make your own plugin to convert it to your language of choice!)

p.s. If you are used to regular coding, Grasshopper will drive you absolutely freaking bonkers at first, but once you square that it is looping but you have to let the whole program complete before seeing the result, you'll get used to it.

[0] https://global.discourse-cdn.com/mcneel/uploads/default/orig...

[1] https://futureofcoding.org/catalog/

[2] https://github.com/ivanreese/visual-programming-codex

[3] http://flowgorithm.org/

Agreed, Rhino/Grasshopper is an amazing tool, especially once you start adding in C# components. I’ve been using it off and on for several years on custom consumer product projects. It’s an under utilized workflow in many fields requiring 3D modeling imo. I just finished a custom VR gasket generator for the Quest 3 that uses face scans from iPhone as the input and the project wouldn’t have been possible without Grasshopper: https://youtu.be/kLMEWerJu0U

That's rad - thanks for sharing! I'll try to watch the whole thing when I'm not on deadline.

My jewelry work [0] is almost all in Grasshopper, as I've built up such a workflow there over the past... 8 years? that I don't need custom tools for most of it.

But my research work is all about building custom tools in C#. In fact I just finally published my component library yesterday [1]. Frankly I should have released it years ago, but I finally just bit the bullet.

[0] https://Xover0.com [1] https://www.food4rhino.com/en/app/horta

Vaguely related: Rhino 3D has the best interface of any 3D modeling tool I've ever used and I'm sad it is not the norm. Is integration between command line and UI is absolutely amazing.

I remember when I first tried to SketchUp I was horrified at how atrocious the UI is compared to rhino 3D.

Yeah, not quite "visual programming,' but there is a similar argument to be made about a program's user interface and how its design suggests it should be used. At this point, that's probably a far better explored area than the same aspect of visual programming.

That said - Rhino is one of the exemplars in this area. I always tell my students - if you don't know what to do, just start typing. As you say the relationship of the graphical command processes and the CLI is stellar.

But - one big shout back to Grasshopper that NOTHING ELSE compares to - if you hold "ctl-alt" and click-hold on a component on the canvas, it opens up the library tab where that component can be found and puts a big arrow pointing to a big circle around it. It's one of the most shockingly useful commands in any program, ever. I've had rooms of students audibly gasp when shown that.

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