Hacker News Reader

Comment by remon | Hacker News Reader

So far there are zero data points on the success side of the fence when it comes to visual programming. The exceedingly rare times I come across it professionally it's a toy project or something that's basically in the state of "We wish it was just code but we don't dare touch it".

View on HN

>So far there are zero data points on the success side of the fence when it comes to visual programming.

What about Alteryx, Blender, LabView, Unreal Blueprint and any number of other node based tools?

What about Blender nodes? I’ve seen some pretty cool and fairly complex generative modeling using nodes.

For a simple example, here is Conway’s Game of Life. I’ve seen much more complex things implemented as well.

https://www.reddit.com/r/blender/s/ehejxLqiiR

In the era of vibe coders, visual programming seems like an interesting way to build consensus with an LLM when making a decision. LLM shows you a visual for its execution and the vibe coders feel like its approachable enough to tinker with the visual to improve execution.

Visual coding as domain stuff DSL has seen success in a variety of areas, as others have given examples to.

It's general purpose programming where it's yet to really succeed.

Node based programming is pretty common for visual effects, like shader graphs (Unity), animation (Houdini), colour grading (DaVinci), etc.

Puredata, Max/MSP for realtime audio/visuals, Touchdesigner

Reply on news.ycombinator.com