Comment by Animats | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Animats | Hacker News Reader

When you get to the end of the article, it turns out that they're building the next generation of Visual Basic.

That's not a fundamentally bad idea. It's also interesting that they focus on modeling and simulation. That's what Alan Kay thought personal computers were going to be for. But all we got is the VisiCalc/Lotus/Excel world. That's useful, but limited.

The problem with visual programming languages has usually been that they don't scale. You end up with a huge collection of lines and boxes. (For a good example, find a game implemented with Blender's game engine and open up the wiring diagram.) They have a chance of solving that problem, because program interconnection has made some progress since the days of Hypercard and UNIX pipes.

There are a lot of line-and-box programming systems in domain-specific areas. LabView, for industrial and research control systems, is one of the most successful. But no one has yet solved the scaling problem. On larger problems, things just get too tangled.

>>That's what Alan Kay thought personal computers were going to be for.

This prediction did work out in one area that computing has always been significant: music-making. If you consider that your average synthesizer is an analog computer with a process pipeline, modern software has definitely fulfilled the modelling/simulation goals set by the pioneers in the early years. The average electronic musician using a computer to compute sound is well and truly driving a computing process with modelling techniques - though there is a very wide scope of variety between the interface being used to produce this result, it is true -nevertheless in the synthesizer world, these concepts have lived on and matured. Play with puredata (http://puredata.info/) or any one of the thousands of other sound modelling/synthesis applications out there and you'll see this reality.

The challenge then becomes to figure out how to turn your average business process into a synthesis, of sorts, which can be modelled in an analogous fashion ..

problem is, the hard part is not coding, the hard part is transforming requirements and workflows into logical structure a computer can understand.

that's the bottleneck, whatever the language.

the new literacy would be not just to see a lego construction and understand the pieces involved, but to see the final construction and to be able to recover the build instructions by sheer mind gymnastic.

> the hard part is transforming requirements and workflows into logical structure

that's like saying for painting a picture, the hard part is knowing where to put the paint. The act of slashing paint on canvas itself is trivial.

I think the real problem is that there hasn't been any proper primitives created - primitives that can be linked together to produce what looks like another primitive. I guess the non-physicalness isn't helping, because lego works really well as a building primitive.

primitives that can be linked together to produce what looks like another primitive

This was the design intent behind UNIX pipes; text processing through composable programs.

I'd go in the other direction and say the problem is too many primitives; it's easy to spend all your time just evaluating possible solution components.

Sometimes when I've had a module of about 500-2000 lines, I have thought that much of it could be represented pictorially in a way that could also be understood by a machine.

I hope they get the next generation of Smalltalk/Lisp Machines.

We need to have coding systems like Wolfram|Alpha being mainstream, not Visual Basic.

It's just his business, he wants to keep making IDEs with a visual aspect to them, so he has to produce posts like this to justify it to the investors. Would be great if he finished the previous one before starting the new one though. Finishing is a skill mankind would benefit from even more: http://makegames.tumblr.com/post/1136623767/finishing-a-game

His last project was LightTable, and provided huge value to people. Can I ask if you ever even used it?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com