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Comment by lolo_ | Hacker News Reader

I think an underrated non-standard approach to programming is graphical programming. Though this approach doesn't seem to received significant uptake amongst professional programmers, there is an application called max [0] that is popular amongst musicians and artists and quite surprisingly powerful and effective.

There's an interesting article [1] on how Jonny Greenwood of Radiohead uses it extensively, in there you can see some examples of how it works - modules wired together visually.

I think there is a lot of potential for a really nice mix between text-based programming and graphical programming to work for general programming too.

[0]:http://cycling74.com/products/max/ [1]:http://thekingofgear.com/post/25443456600/max-msp

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I've used graphical programming in the past. It sounds amazing in abstract, but ends up being a mess when it is implemented. It basically requires a "sufficiently smart editor", which, even if implemented perfectly, would not leave a lot of room for a third-party ecosystem to be built around the language.

There are many solved problems in text-based programming that would need to be resolved in order for a graphical programming language to be as useful.

How would one post a "snippet" to StackOverflow? How would diffs work? Consequently, how would source code management work?

The solution that comes to mind is that the graphical elements are backed by text for these purposes. Then, the graphical interface amounts to an editor for this meta-language.

Inevitably, that is what is attempted. But it doesn't solve the use cases I mentioned.

To take a diff for example, not only do you need to illustrate the diff version of (I drew a new line from here to here and made this other box green), you would also need to illustrate patches to textual details and how they related to the graphical code.

Maybe I can imagine a solution that could do that (at great expense). I cannot imagine the language being friendly enough that third-party compilers, IDEs, or static-analysis tools would be feasible.

The digital media department at my alma mater used Max/MSP to teach programming to art students with a lot of success. It's really fascinating to watch the programs as they run, and it makes for a great way to visualize abstraction and separation of concerns in a concrete way.

My degree included a "Computer Music" option, which were a few classes that were half music students and half computer science ones. We used Max/MSP quite a bit.

For anyone that wants to play around with a very similar language, PureData is an open-source application that is a relative of Max/MSP (they share a creator, and are quite similar). Not wanting to come in to do the homework or purchase the software myself, I used it quite a bit.

http://puredata.info/

Graphical programming is also popular for animation/cgi/special FX, e.g. XPresso in Cinema4D.

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