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Comment by tgv | Hacker News Reader

These things have been done in Labview, and it's hard to get anywhere. It's also been done in sound/music generation programs, with Max [max] as a (the?) granddaddy. While you can get things done, it quickly becomes messy too.

Does it look good? I don't think so.

[max] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_(software)

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IMO the visual wire/node paradigm of Max/MSP and Pure Data makes a lot of sense because it builds upon the "plug one box into another" interface that electronic music hardware follows, and because it can mirror electronic circuit layouts. I find it far easier to follow complex signal flows (especially with animated realtime diagrams showing numeric values in real time) in a visual layout vs. static text blocks.

Also more recent versions of Max/MSP have "mc" (multi-channel connections so you don't have to create separate wires/nodes for multiple identical signals) and text-based programming nodes with "~gen" and JavaScript.

Simulink should be included in the list?

All this "block programming languages" look promising, abstraction by black-boxing, doing boxes of boxes... I wonder if the implementations are bad, they are badly used, or the paradigm just does not work...

One thing to take into account, is that those things are typically used by people who have no idea how to program and abstract things. Maybe if somebody is good ad programming would not do a mess out of it; but then (s)he could just go ahead and write code. so.....

I must agree, LabView is terrible, not just because of that, but updates break everything, licensing, etc... just PITA

It takes a different mindset but clean and legible LabVIEW code can be written. There was a small community of professional LabVIEW developers who generally write very legible and good code. Different from what most people are used to but good. I left that world years ago because the writing was on the wall, LabVIEW was going to die no matter what you could do with it.

LabVIEW is still used a lot in Aerospace. Definitely due for a replacement at some point.

I spent a lot of time in LabVIEW as well. I stopped with it way back when Active-X was thing and I got sick of always having to interface LabVIEW with Active-X controls.

LabVIEW is great for certain things, I think it has potential for others, but it's just too limited for general purpose computing.

Perhaps more important than anything is the fact that you can't just download it and use it like almost anything else these days. I don't think that has changed. It's not cheap either and they've switched to a subscription model.

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