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Comment by marcioaguiar | Hacker News Reader

It's important to point out that was Bret Victor that created this concept from which Kahn Academy took inspiration from.

https://vimeo.com/36579366 http://ejohn.org/blog/introducing-khan-cs/

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As Bret Victor says in his essay, live coding is not a new concept and he did not create it.

The current trend in live coding seems to have spawned from a discussion between two computer musicians (Fabrice Mogini and Julian Rohrhuber) in 2001, with masses of related prior art going back to Lisp machines, Self, Smalltalk, corewar etc.

Responsive live programming (not just code reload), which is closer to what Bret Victor is doing here, goes back to various visual languages of the 80s and 90s.

Like the ones I mentioned.

You didn't mention any VPLs. I would throw in a few...ThingLab, AgentSheets, LabView, Prograph, Fabrik, and so on. These were the original live languages.

Self is certainly one. http://selflanguage.org/documentation/published/programming-...

But why do you think liveness requires visual programming? I see them as pretty much orthogonal.

Separately, when I see "visual programming language" I see "unusual programming language". When language features become normal (like 2D syntax in Python/haskell), then we stop calling them visual. A great deal of visual features are just alternative ways of structuring text, ways of constraining syntax, or ways of constructing high dimensional (and therefore non-visual) graphs. To a large extent, all programming languages are visual.

Why would you call Self a visual language? It has an IDE, but the language is most definitely textual. Its only when you throw in Morphic does the line begin to blur, but you are back to text again if you want to write any code. Many languages we think of as visual are more structured or graphical (graphics baked around text); compare ToonTalk to Scratch! Most languages fall somewhere in a spectrum between heavily visual and heavily textual, but this is my own classification system and there is hardly much consensus on the topic.

Liveness doesn't require visual, of course, but that's where liveness first shows up in history (SketchPad, along with directness). I go into some of the history in my own paper on the topic (http://lamp.epfl.ch/~mcdirmid/mcdirmid07dead.pdf).

I haven't actually used Self, but from reading the paper, discussion of embodiment, tangible objects, and direct manipulation makes it interesting from a visual perspective.

Personally I think all computer languages are textual by definition, and vary in the amount of extra visual support for syntax and more often secondary notation. The Reactable perhaps pushes beyond this limit by making proximity and orientation part of the syntax, but still is basically about composing textual symbols.

If we're doing that thing, I wrote a chapter on this in my thesis :) http://yaxu.org/thesis/

[ For the benefit of any others, here's a link to Sean's preprint: http://lamp.epfl.ch/~mcdirmid/mcdirmid07live.pdf ]

But that aspect of Self comes mostly from Morphic. Anyways, Self/Morphic were a huge inspiration on my own work. There are deeper distinctions between textual and visual; think a Van Goh painting vs. a book by Steven King. They say "a picture is worth a thousands words," but actually, the worths are not very comparable. Text is much better at expressing abstractions than visuals are, which is why most VPLs mixin some text (though their are pure VPLs like SketchPad and ToonTalk).

I skimmed your thesis a few months ago; lots of good work there! But I think we are a bit out of whack on our world views (arts vs. PL), which is why we might not be talking on the same page.

Thanks, I forgot about the DigitalLibrary link :p. If someone is just looking for related work, better to try http://lamp.epfl.ch/~mcdirmid/mcdirmid07dead.pdf (smaller download as it doesn't embed quicktime movies).

Yes we are probably talking past each other here a little, but I enjoy and respect your work on SuperGlue. Not having used Self I don't understand the distinction between it and Morphic.

There clearly is a distinction between textual and visual, but at the same time they support one another: text is made out of pictures, pictures can be described with text (e.g. svg). For me the aim of visual programming language research shouldn't be to disparage or get away from the composition of symbols, but to supplement that with mental imagery. As I see it, mental imagery and language are most valuable in combination.

I'll look into sketchpad and toontalk properly though, "truly" visual language is a fascinating area.

Self is a language, Morphic is a GUI toolkit/framework/library. You can play with Morphic implementation in some Smalltalks (I did it in Pharo) and even in JavaScript: http://www.chirp.scratchr.org/blog/?p=34

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