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Comment by cl3misch | Hacker News Reader

I'm not sure about the AI features but the concept of working with code on a canvas and having some sort of flowchart UI has been a dream of mine for some time. I mainly do data processing and draw lots of flowcharts for communicating pipelines and also for myself. Having a development UI which goes in that direction somewhat would be great for handling unwieldy codebases written by non-CS folk.

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Is a tool like LabView what you have in mind?

https://www.ni.com/en/shop/labview.html

Yeah kind of. I have worked with LabView and liked the flowchart UI for handling lab instruments, but for somewhat complex algorithms it got unwieldy really fast.

I have the feeling LabView is a good tool for designing control panels and visual tools in general ("front-end"). It is less suited for implementing back-end algorithms. I guess I wish for a similar tool which can also handle the back-end (in the context of my data processing job).

The problem is that I don't know myself what UI I would actually want for a "canvas-based editor". Some mixture between a visual flowchart and being able to edit code in each box? I'm obviously not the first person to think about it and it seems to be a non-trivial problem.

Kind of like what BlueJ does with Java?

Curious if the problem you're encountering is visualizing the data flow vs. the control flow?

It would be awesome if we can sketch diagrams and code in the same canvas! This would make visual documentation much easier.

you can do asciidoctor, plantUML kroki in vscode so maybe its present mode can already be used in there like that?

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