Most visual programming environments fail to get any usage. Why? They try to replace code syntax and business logic but developers never try to visualize that. Instead, developers visualize state transitions, memory layouts, or network requests.
In my opinion, those working on visual programming would be more likely to succeed if they started with aspects of software that developers already visualize.
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Developers say they want “visual programming”, which makes you think “oh, let’s replace
ifandfor”. But nobody ever made a flow chart to readfor (i in 0..10) if even?(i) print(i). Developers familiar with code already like and understand textual representations to read and write business logic2.Let’s observe what developers do, not what they say.
Developers do spend the time to visualize aspects of their code but rarely the logic itself. They visualize other aspects of their software that are important, implicit, and hard to understand.
Here are some visualizations that I encounter often in serious contexts of use:
- Various ways to visualize the codebase overall.
- Diagrams that show how computers are connected in a network
- Diagrams that show how data is laid out in memory
- Transition diagrams for state machines.
- Swimlane diagrams for request / response protocols.
This is the visual programming developers are asking for. Developers need help with those problems and they resort to visuals to tackle them.
tbh, the only place I can do visual programming is on shader graphs because you get to see the results faster
I think it’s just that the variables there are both highly structured and very complex.
Statistics and data science could probably use it as well, never tried it myself though.
Not for the data cleaning part though. I don’t know if anyone is willing to debug JSON monstrosities like that.
The best implementation of this that I have seen has been Frends Integration platform (https://frends.com). We use it at work, and have implemented ~500 business and integration processes with it.
This kind of visual programming works well in close to business logic implementations, were it is important to be able to quickly understand the business need behind the process.
How Frends work on the background, it compiles the visual process to C# code, so it is actually quite fast. Many solutions interpreters the process flow while executing, which makes them much slower.
My background is in normal code development, and I still think that there is a place for that. I have always hated having the raw business process in code, because those tend to change, and reimplementing code because process changes, is always really annoying.
Ooh that’s a thought. As someone with aphantasia, the concept of visualizing programming is absolutely foreign to me. I should ask my colleagues what they visualize.
Aphantasia is the inability to visualize.
Interesting.
For some things I definitely spatially lay out elements to put them into relation. I also visualize UI when thinking about it.
When I think of code hierarchies and relations, I wonder if it always ends up spatially or if sometimes I skip/omit that visualization, and if and what difference that makes. 🤔 I guess when it’s complex enough, I skip the obvious intuition and visualize to find understanding.
Basically, we need to transform the visual element of Factorio into some sort of code
Only good use I’ve ever seen of visual programming is for stuff with minimal control flow, usually stuff that runs in parallel (i.e. shaders and blender’s geometry nodes)
I develop this interactive climate-system model in scala.js - instead of standard tests, after each code change i just look at the circle of plots and see all look and behave (react to adjustable parameters) as i expect - the rotating cogs are also clues as to what recalculated and how long it took, and link to relevant code. Such development is a very visual process, although still much to improve.
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