Visual Programming Is Unbelievable (2015)

http://www.outsystems.com/blog/2015/03/visual-programming-is-unbelievable.html

by tiago_simoes • 10 years ago

94 103 10 years ago

staticelf• 10 years ago

The title sounds like it comes from BuzzFeed.

TuringTest12• 10 years ago

That post has no clue about the shortcomings, which were true in the past but needn't be any longer. Programmers have been doing visual programming since the advent of the visual debugger that shows updated values during program execution, and they are requesting more and more of it with tools for Live Programming like jsfiddle or LightTable (for VP in classic languages) or new languages like Apparatus[1] or Eve[2].

We are in the middle of the Visual Programming renaissance, now that the hurdles that limited composability of visual programs have been theoretically solved in the last decade by Programming Languages researchers, and computers are finally powerful enough to move visual languages without slowing to a crawl.

Unfortunately, Visual Programming suffers the same curse as Artificial Intelligence: for every breakthrough that produces revolutionary new tools, it is no longer considered Visual Programming but merely "how the tools should work".

[1] http://aprt.us/

[2] http://eve-lang.com/

hacker_98• 10 years ago

'Visual Programming' failed (and continues to fail) simply because it is a lie; just because you surround my textual code with boxes and draw arrows showing the 'flow of execution' does not make it visual! This core misunderstanding is why all these 'visual' tools suck and don't help anyone do anything practical (read: practical = complex systems).

When I write code, for example a layout algorithm for a set of gui elements, I visually see the data in my head (the gui elements), then I run the algorithm and see the elements 'move' into position dependent upon their dock/anchor/margin properties (also taking into account previously docked elements positions, parent element resize delta, etc). This is the visual I need to see on screen! I need to see my real data being manipulated by my algorithms and moving from A to B. I expect with this kind of animation I could easily see when things go wrong naturally, seeing as visual processing happens with no conscious effort.

Instead visual programming thinks I want to see the textual properties of my objects in memory in fancy coloured boxes, which is not the case at all.

stkni• 10 years ago

This seems pretty close to my experience. I remember thinking when I first encountered SQL Server Integration Services that this is 'visual programming'.

It didn't take very long to realise that as a solution SSIS was well suited to some simple tasks where the logical actions on screen matched those taking place on the database.

But as soon as those tasks became even slightly more complex, and this mirror was broken, the whole thing sort of fell apart. Then I was struggling to find ways to defeat the system to make it do what I wanted. It was with this realisation, i.e. that the solution was the problem, that I stopped using it.

But it's not just SSIS that suffered this way, ActiveBatch is another example and I'm sure there are plenty more.

fsloth4• 10 years ago

For fairly simple configuration tasks IMO visual programming is a powerful tool for non-programmer end users to actually create programs which are not prone to syntax errors, misguided loop conditions or such. It also means one does not need to learn yet another syntax. True, the application domains are limited, but for example the common node based computational graph generation done for example in Blender and other visual software works quite well.

It's not meant for professional programming, it's about empowering the end user with programmable tools.

hacker_98• 10 years ago

But at what point does simple become complex? It's all well and good saying only use it for simple tasks, but when real life complexity comes knocking, you end up with this sort of magic [1] that is far worse than any C++ I've seen in the wild.

[1] http://scriptsofanotherdimension.tumblr.com

TuringTest12• 10 years ago

Visual programming excels at data wrangling (parsing structured data in an input/output pipeline that spits the same filtered data in a new format and structure).

You're right that until now its usage has been limited to domain-specific languages for automating applications. But with the emergence of functional programming in the mainstream and visual tools that follow that paradigm, I predict that soon there will be visual tools that allow quite general programming. (I've already seen working prototypes, and they deliver on most of the promises).

TuringTest12• 10 years ago

Watch Bret Victor's videos about Learnable Programming[1], in particular Stop Drawing Dead Fish. [2] Only because visual tools in the past were limited to putting properties in boxes doesn't mean that all visual tools have to be that way.

[1] http://worrydream.com/LearnableProgramming/

[2] https://vimeo.com/64895205

hacker_98• 10 years ago

I have seen it, and while Bret Victors 'research' is interesting, none of it actually scales to a practical level.

watty• 10 years ago

Just because they haven't replaced coding in a text editors for all use cases doesn't mean they "failed". In my industry (PLC, building automation), visual programming languages are the norm and are extremely successful.

They significantly drop the barrier to entry and allow basic controlling of systems for non-programmers.

DonHopkins7• 10 years ago

Spreadsheets are visual programming languages, and they seem pretty popular, and have been for a while.

pmarreck• 10 years ago

Not only that, they're functionally-evaluated!

hacker_98• 10 years ago

Low barrier of entry for high yield, thus their popularity. Though they really don't scale well, and you can end up with the stuff of nightmares.

DonHopkins7• 10 years ago

It's sad how fuzzy the CSV file format is for such an important commonly used kind of file. Like how the name of the first column can't be "ID" or Office will give you an inexplicable error about some "SYLK" filter you don't care about. [1] Who would ever want to name their first column "ID", huh?

[1] https://bz.apache.org/ooo/show_bug.cgi?id=117508

rbanffy3• 10 years ago

Not really. You still need to write formulas using a textual language.

DonHopkins7• 10 years ago

Or selecting formulas from menus and parameters by pointing and clicking and dragging, directly manipulating rows, columns and cells, and addressing parameters by relative two-dimensional offsets.

wvenable4• 10 years ago

And they have all the same problems; beyond a certain problem size they're unwieldy and confusing.

jbb555• 10 years ago

The problem with visual programming is the same as those UML tools where you designed classes with boxes then filled in the code later. First of all it's quicker and easier to define with text than drawing. And second of all the detail is the important bit. You can't design the high level code in isolation and then fill in how it works. You need to build up the components from the details and see how the abstractions emerge. And that's not very visual/.

mtanski2• 10 years ago

There is one place where visual programming is alive and well and has been for a long time. That's programming PLC (Programmable Logic Controllers). It's easy to forget about PLCs[1], but it's an old and large niche in large corporations that do a lot of industrial automation like assembly lines, (automobile) manufacturing, oil & gas...

Most PLC programming is done using Ladder Logic [2] and various visual tools tools for creating and editing Ladder Logic. Here's a screenshot of one such environment, RSLogix: https://i.ytimg.com/vi/4yEj065J1q4/maxresdefault.jpg

It's an interesting data point because A) it's a highly technical field where accuracy (and verification) matters B) almost everybody who does PLC programming spends all their time in a visual programming environment.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programmable_logic_controller

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ladder_logic

DonHopkins7• 10 years ago

Visual programming is also alive and well in device, instrument and robotic control, where accuracy and reliability is important.

At the high end of the mission critical benevolent guardian mega robot spectrum, the Maeslantkering [1] is programmed in LabView [2]. I sure hope it's accurately programmed and well debugged!

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maeslantkering

[2] http://www.ni.com/labview/?cid=Advertising-LabVIEW-Northern_...

hacker_98• 10 years ago

Yet user's of LabView describe it as a horror to actually use practically [1].

[1] https://jshoer.wordpress.com/2007/08/03/why-i-hate-despise-d...

notalaser2• 10 years ago

The Wikipedia page links to a credible article which mentions that "the software that drives it is written in C++ and consists of 200,000 lines of code for the operational system and 250,000 lines of code for the simulation systems.[2]"

What am I missing?

RealityVoid• 10 years ago

Except the programming is shit. My first job was building DCS software for coal power plants. We had such a graphical programming language. I can assure you, it was a pain in the butt to work with. Oh, you want to build many similar logic systems? Go ahead, do the SAME thing 200 times, click spamming is your job. The technology is used not because it's good, but because the industry is stuck in the 80's.

I understand the appeal of having visual flow and feedback for your code but I see no reason why the building of code should be exclusively visual. I see great improvements that can be made by programatically generating control structures. But, well, the clients pay for it, the companies get wads of cash for sending engineers in the field so I guess it all works out in the end.

As a side note, I suspects that if someone good puts his mind to it they could generate the code out of the layout of the plant and the different control mechanisms involved. With proper constraints, I suspects the system would be sufficiently defined without laying one stupid line (like, an actual line, from point A to point B) of code.

mtanski2• 10 years ago

Never said it a great experience, just that they used visual programing to express logic flow.

And I agree, the "language" forces you to repeat yourself. I believe that over the years there's been attempts at alternatives but none of them caught on. The only new things you see if faster hardware (PLC), new buses (took forever for ethernet to catch on) and new classes of IO / devices to control.

The controls / industrial automation industry has different set of constraints & values. It's a very conservative industry. Double so if what you're programming is safety and error proofing.

So the industry values tools that consistent, maintainable (by current / future staff). There's many cases where you might be supporting an installation with a mixture of both new and 20 year old hardware.

It is just a different world.

snowwindwaves• 10 years ago

Both of the major platforms Allen Bradley RSLogix 5000 and Schneider Electric Unity allow the programmer to create objects of user defined data types and functions that can operate on elementary (eg float, INT) or user defined data types. They also support arrays, and arrays of objects. They also both support structured text so you can type if statements and for loops and call functions. So for at least those PLC platforms it is not exclusively visual and you can write a function once and use it many times.

pmoriarty• 10 years ago

Another place where visual programming is popular is among music producers, with systems like Max/MSP[1] and PureData[2].

I dabbled in PureData a little, and while it seemed to be ok for simple things, I imagine that for anything even moderately complex, it would quickly become a nightmare.

While visual programming paradigms seem like a nice thing at first glance, they are missing out on whole ecosystems of tools developed over many decades for text-based programming. Things like debugging, version control, grep, search/replace, all the features of advanced text editors like vim or emacs, etc.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max/MSP

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pure_Data

Joeboy• 10 years ago

Also node-based visual compositing (eg. Nuke / Natron / Blender's compositor). It works very well there, although it does rely on people doing proper programming to create the nodes.

sebular• 10 years ago

I don't know what your definition of a "moderately complex" program looks like, but I have to say that from my own dabbling with PureData I really enjoyed the way it handled the concepts of abstraction and encapsulation.

It's been long enough that I've forgotten the terminology, but I remember thoroughly enjoying the process of first building a widget, then meticulously arranging all of the little boxes, color-coding, and labeling various sections until it looked visually attractive. Then when I was satisfied, I could take that entire widget and abstract it away as a small box with only the relevant input/output connectors.

I guess it's always just stuck out in my mind as the one time I really dug into a visual language, and the aesthetic aspect of organizing my "code" was very appealing. It's been a decade since I last opened any of those old project files, but I can still picture many of the components I built with my mind's eye. In and of itself, that's got to be worth something.

I imagine that someday we'll see the rise of a programming metaphor that works as a hybrid of code and visual. Even though working with PureData was inspirational, I don't see text-based languages losing relevancy any time soon. However, I think that while text code is great for representing the flow of logic, higher-order organizational constructs (such as class hierarchies) might be better represented by visual relationships. If I give you a paper and pencil and ask you to map out interconnected relationships between a bunch of entities, you're probably going to start drawing boxes and lines-- and end up with something that looks a lot like PureData.

Especially if you consider the potential of future iterations on today's VR/AR concepts, I wouldn't be too surprised if programming languages eventually looked like color-coded interconnected boxes of text code that can be rearranged in space. It wouldn't even be that far-fetched to imagine animations being included to enhance a programmer's ability to visualize the flow of logic. And I don't think that such concepts should be particularly offensive to those who consider themselves to be serious programmers.

DonHopkins7• 10 years ago

Jeremy Bernstein's discussion of NATO+3d modular has some interesting screen dumps of Max/MSP programs. [1]

Depending on the temperament of the "NATO.0+55 pilots" [2], the code could get pretty ahem "artistic" looking. [3]

[1] http://www.bootsquad.com/old_site/nato/nato00.html

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nato.0%2B55%2B3d#NATO.0.2B55_p...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nato.0%2B55%2B3d#/media/File:N...

soundwave106• 10 years ago

The nice thing about VPLs is that they are more intuitive to people with non-programming experience. I imagine many Max/MSP / PD artists have never written a line of C in their life. And even if you have programming experience, VPLs can be a lot quicker to set up for certain tasks versus writing a full fledged plugin. So VPLs can be great as a prototyping / experimentation tool.

But yes, absolutely, for more complex tasks (and my examples would be: DSP routines such as filtering, anti-alias oscillators, etc.), it would be better to use a text language. Both PureData and Max/MSP have external objects (that you write and compile in a text based language) for this purpose... although, even these objects will never be as fully optimized as a plugin that is completely text-language based.

RangerScience2• 10 years ago

I'm actually reading this article while in a two-day introduction to PLC programming. It's been pretty fascinating, and is an interesting view into earlier days of programming...

...From here, I definitely feel like there's something "we" missed in how these systems work, and the situations they describe. But there's also a great deal that they've missed - and are stuck in the 80s.

I think the big one is that these systems (PLC visual programming environments) don't let me make my own domain-specific languages, and that's maybe the killer app of modern code.

But there's also some interesting bits - there's something that looks like agent-based programming: There's a series of environments, and you have a function (agent) that modifies an environment. You point it at each the environments, just like a loop, and it does it's thing, like a weird cross between functional and state-based, that works because it's all a form of stigmergy.

mcphage2• 10 years ago

stigmergy

This is a new word for me—thanks :-)

thenomad• 10 years ago

Also 3D graphics.

Both in real-time and pre-rendered graphics, node graph-style programming languages are very much a thing. Unreal Engine's Blueprints system, Motionbuilder's nodes system, Maya's graph systems...

And they can get pretty huge and complex.

Finnucane• 10 years ago

"That evolution, which seems so inevitable today, brought us better graphic cards – which lead to better games, brought us the world wide web,"

It should be remembered that in the early days of the web, some people argued that it should remain text-only. Basically, if you couldn't read it on the command line with Lynx, they weren't interested. Of course, the web seemed different at 9600 baud (or even slower).

Being color-blind, I am not enthusiastic about the idea of visual programming, just because a lot of visual tools are color-coded in ways that are hard for me to work with, esp. if the default settings are not easily modified. Even syntax-coloring in a text editor is a chore to deal with.

VLM• 10 years ago

Can't communicate visually. The translation between written and spoken words, even made up technical words, is fast, accurate, unambiguous. Visual means slow, inaccurate, ambiguous, which is sometimes cool for art, but not for communication.

It would be like trying to program musically, or by touch, or by (oh no) smell.

There is also the productivity danger of futzing, or whatever the modern term is. In the early desktop publishing era, we were promised that instead of taking ten minutes writing a memo, we'd type one in five minutes, but reality was we'd spend an hour using a minimum of seven fonts and three text colors and pictures. So much for productivity improvement! Likewise a visual programming language would invite people with authority but no ability to endlessly rearrange "put that box over there, looks nicer" "Make that text red" "that needs a larger font".

yiyus• 10 years ago

Except we can perfectly communicate visually, and we do it all the time.

It is common to draw diagrams when you are trying to understand or explain a problem. If you want to give somebody a rough idea of how your program works, it is infinitely more likely that you use some kind of drawing than music, touch or smell.

I don't agree neither with visual programming inviting people to lose time in details. The same you do not lose time thinking about how to structure a sentence to write a program, you would not lose it changing colors and fonts in a visual programming environment with an enforced "syntax".

I do not like visual programming (I have had very bad experiences with LabView), but I think it may be as good (or as bad) as text if the field had evolved differently.

justinclift• 10 years ago

"Except we can perfectly communicate visually, and we do it all the time."

Hmmm, someone should create a visual programming language using Dilbert characters & iconography. :)

wvenable4• 10 years ago

Visual communication without language is always much simpler and more abstract than other forms of visual communication. Without invoking a language with syntax, you simply cannot get enough information density to make it useful.

The only time we generally communicate visually is when we want to express something with less detail (e.g. charts, diagrams, graphs, emoji, etc).

egraether• 10 years ago

I'm currently working on a developer tool that leverages the advantages of visualization not for writing source code, but for navigation and understanding. Coati, a source explorer for C/C++, combines graph visualization and source code interactively. The graph makes it easy to see what relationships a class or a function has, while the code still provides all the details of the implementation.

https://www.coati.io/

kelvin02• 10 years ago

So it would be like a souped-up Visual Assist (as used in VS C++)?

anthk• 10 years ago

Smalltalk is pretty close. I use the GNU one (yeah, I know about Pharo) and is awesome you can switch between a Smalltalk scripting and the VisualGST browser.

jerf• 10 years ago

It is a very strange essay form to give multiple reasons why a thing has not worked very well, then end it with the conclusion that people just irrationally don't like it because your brain is just biased against it.

I don't believe in it in the general case simply because I've never seen a general-purpose visual programming language work. Show me one and show me lots of people choosing it freely and I'll believe just fine. I'm not holding my breath, though. (There are certainly specialized ones that meet this bar.)

Most analyses of this problem fall prey to the "anything can be made to look good if you only consider the positives of one side and the negatives of the other" effect. Visual advocates generally make wild promises about the positives of visual programming, which turn out to much harder to manifest than imagine in your head, and then make silly criticisms of textual languages, mistaking accidental issues of complexity for fundamental issues in the language. (Visual languages, just as one example, have no special protection against spaghetti code, any more than anything else does. Spaghetti code is not caused by textual languages, it's caused by developers creating spaghetti code from the spaghetti concepts in their heads.)

So not only are the analyses incomplete, examining only the positives of visual languages and the negatives of textual languages, most of the ones I see are even pretty terrible on those terms.

If you want do this, you need to look at both the pros and the cons of both sides, fairly. And if you haven't got a solid set of positives on the textual side and negatives on the visual side, go back and do it again.

(I'm not saying you must conclude that the net benefit is to text. You may have things that outweigh what I mentioned and your sum may come out in favor of visual programming. I'm simply saying if you can't explain in a sensible manner why text has been successful and why existing visual languages have failed, you do not have an analysis. You have a wish.)

hacker_98• 10 years ago

To add to this, I present to you screenshots of visual programming spaghetti code in all of it's glory [1].

[1] http://scriptsofanotherdimension.tumblr.com

s_kilk• 10 years ago

Takes me back to my Max/MSP days.

mcphage2• 10 years ago

screenshots of visual programming spagetti code in all of it's glory

While that serves as a reminder that visual programming isn't a cure for spaghetti code, (a) it was never claimed to be, and (b) terrible spaghetti code exists in all sufficiently powerful programming environments. I don't know that I'd enjoy tracing through that any more than untangling a mess of objects and functions that call each other—but then, I don't know that I'd "enjoy" it any less, either.

jimbokun• 10 years ago

So one advantage of visual programming languages, spaghetti code literally looks like a plate of spaghetti!

rbanffy3• 10 years ago

I found it odd there is no mention to Scratch or Scheme Bricks.

https://vimeo.com/62615513

fsloth4• 10 years ago

This. Scratch is the killer application of visual programming. It's educational, yes, but it's excellent at that (from experiences from my two kids).

AstroJetson• 10 years ago

Is there a production system or game for sale that's written in Scratch?

Danieru• 10 years ago

At work we use a blend of C++ with Unreal Engine's visual programming language Blueprints. I am going to be honest with you guys here: I love blueprints.

They are very limited compared, lacking even maps. When it comes to connecting existing behavior together they are king. Consider the parts of game development which cannot be made generic. By sticking those in Blueprints we get nice high level code.

failrate• 10 years ago

I was a skeptic of visual programming, but experience has taught me that Blueprints is a good enough language for a large set of tasks.

bholzer• 10 years ago

Blueprints are by far the best experience I have had with visual programming

fsloth4• 10 years ago

Visual programming is doing quite well in editing computational graphs in software such as Maya or Blender.

ThomPete• 10 years ago

Here is a comprehensive list of different visual programming languages.

http://blog.interfacevision.com/design/design-visual-progarm...

The issue isn't visual programming but rather that we haven't found many good cases to use it still.

I do think visual programming is going to have a bigger and bigger impact in things like robotics, space exploration etc where you need more tactile access to computation power.

It's kind of like with the idea of a 3d interface. It only make sense when the holistic whole rather than the details are important.

It makes no sense to create a 3d warehouse I can walk around when I could just do a search and a list.

But you wouldn't necessarily want to control a robot doing repairs on your spaceship by having to program it every time you wanted it to do something new.

gk1• 10 years ago

Similar discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11204017

(From my submission just 6 days ago.)

bantunes• 10 years ago

I don't get it - isn't the Outsystems Platform (following the link from the blog) a visual programming environment? This article seems very odd coming from Outsystems itself. What am I missing here?

nwah1• 10 years ago

Showing that you're aware of all the drawbacks may give customers more confidence that they've been addressing them.

I've used outsystems, and it was straightforward. Although I prefer C#.

zapov• 10 years ago

They are probably dissatisfied with developer stance toward their RAD framework.

I'm sure various business apps can be built successfully on top of their Visual programming IDE, but even Microsoft has mostly abandoned that route.

But I dislike that even they propagate the lie that systems are slow when built on top of "High level language". That is mostly an optimization problem and you can often optimize well beyond what people would be willing to do in lower level language.

im_down_w_otp• 10 years ago

Quartz Composer is a pretty effective visual programming environment. At least as far as a particular problem domain is concerned.

felixbraun• 10 years ago

To illustrate of what is possible with Quartz Composer: https://youtu.be/eUEr4P_RWDA

carsongross• 10 years ago

Visual programming does not work well mostly due to a physical problem: typing characters into a computer is much faster and flexible at generating imperative code than using a mouse. There are declarative domains, such as simple UI building, where that is less true, but even then, when you kick out to the event handler, text is much faster.

IntelliJ has done more for visual programming, by integrating visual/wizard aspects seamlessly into a text-dominant environment, than almost all the visual programming advocates of the last fifty years.

Visual environments do demo well, and sometimes convince businessmen that they won't need to pay those annoying and expensive programmers so much money. Hence its enduring appeal to the business world.

aniijbod• 10 years ago

Software developed using visual programming languages often has the potential/necessity to include content which constitutes a 'visual/non-visual hybrid' as the application becomes more complex: the boxes to which arrows are connected usually contain things which are lines of text/symbols/formulae, i.e. are not 'diagrammatic'. Visual programming languages tend to use diagrams for structure and 'notationally rich text' for content and are therefore addressing requirements for simplifying the representation of and increasing the intelligibility of the structure of application development as their highest priority. The reason why this rationale can seem to be problematic is because justifying/achieving the job of meaningfully 'separating structure from content' in software brings it's own highly contingent/subjective challenges (as any detractor of object-oriented design will be aware). For instance, how far could/should you go in trying to 'diagrammatise' the notational content of boxes in a boxes and arrows language. Is the fact that you are diagrammatising the app at all enough of a benefit in terms of reducing the learning curve/programming aptitude requirement, such that 'further/total diagrammatisation' is nothing more than a 'diminishing returns' consideration? What criteria do you use to decide the 'diagramtic benefit limit'? The biggest growing business in software development today is 'triple A games development' and visual programming languages are used as a way of giving designers the means to create content and gameplay without requiring the designer to have programming skill levels that match those of developers (developers can then optimise the designer's work by converting it into C++ to get the frame rate up and integrating it with the rest of their native codebase). Here's an example of an impressive case in point done in UE4 Blueprints without a single line of C++: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EjCandEgtHo

127001brewer• 10 years ago

...otherwise you might just end up in the wrong side of history.

And I don't believe it worked within the US Army [0][1][2] - unless I'm not correctly remembering the history of Outsystem's Visual Programming there...

[0] https://www.outsystems.com/company/news/2012/outsystems-us-a... [1] http://www.army.mil/article/96352/SEC_s_Cloud_Mil_solution_f... [2] http://www.afcea.org/content/?q=us-army-innovates-cloud-comp...

pier25• 10 years ago

Visual programming is exploding in Unreal Engine with Blueprints to define in-game behaviours.

https://docs.unrealengine.com/latest/INT/Engine/Blueprints/i...

I for myself think visual programming is not really programming, since by following that train of thought any GUI like Photoshop Actions could be considered programming.

tluyben2• 10 years ago

I worked quite a bit with Outsystems and like with all the tools that use boxes(/balls) with lines between them as 'visual programming', it depends largely on how you organise things if / when it becomes a big mess. After a while of working with it we usually just wrote what we needed in C# and when we had very abstract things hooked them up. It looks/works well but needs a lot of discipline (and thus training) and it's crazy expensive (for what it does) imho.

murukesh_s2• 10 years ago

IMO, Visual programming does not have a proper definition yet. Coding frontend and coding backend are altogether two different things and sometimes users confuse the application of visual authoring (programming) in one area with the other.

But I believe it is the future. I bet you won't be carrying your laptop, enslaved by the physical keyboard, which is necessary for traditional 'coding' with you in 2030. You would be dragging and dropping stuff, perhaps in Virtual reality headset or through voice or gesture to build what you want, just like you would author in a visual platform like Adobe illustrator or in a 3d authoring tool.

Visual programming have it's own strength and weaknesses. For e.g. Creating algorithms from scratch in a Visual programming is not very productive (yet), but authoring business logic is highly effective in Visual programming. How many times, as a regular programmer you have had to write an algorithm? Most often it's just business logic that we tag under the category of an algorithm, which is not right. Algorithms are very generic piece of logic and business logic applies to your own problem/data specifically. If you have a closer look you realize that we are simply reusing algorithms or modules (created by a smaller group of people comparatively) to build the rules/business logic. What we do is mostly write glue code. we don't really need to code for that.

There are tons of examples for highly successful application of visual programming. But as an average web developer you never get to see that. Reason - Visual authoring tools are highly expensive and hence are confined to fortune 500 companies. That along with lack of quality open source implementations are the reason for visual programming to never take off among general web programming community. Even the newer generation ones like Treeline (for backend) and Bubble.is (frontend) are also closed source. NoFlo is open source and it almost started to create some buzz, but the team got sidetracked apparently, and they are using dataflow method for authoring frontend which is a highly inefficient.

You want to see successful application of Visual programming in real life? Ever heard of Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) ? Business Process Automation (BPMN/BPEL) ? Extract Transform and Load (ETL)? They all employ Visual programming to a great extend and are multi-billion dollar businesses. Do a google image search of following, in no particular order.

Dell bhoomi (EAI)

Tibco Business Works (EAI)

Snaplogic (Founded by Informatica ex. CEO) (EAI)

MuleESB/Anypoint studio (EAI)

Oracle BPEL (Business process automation)

Tibco iProcess (Business process automation)

Mendix (Web app development)

Webratio (Web app development)

(+lots of others if you dig out)

wvenable4• 10 years ago

I bet you won't be carrying your laptop, enslaved by the physical keyboard, which is necessary for traditional 'coding' with you in 2030.

I disagree. I wouldn't have thought that Microsoft, author of Visual Basic, would be basically forced in 2015 to add improvements to their console system -- but here we are. If anything text-based programming is more prominent now than in the last 10 years.

You would be dragging and dropping stuff, perhaps in Virtual reality headset or through voice or gesture to build what you want, just like you would author in a visual platform like Adobe illustrator or in a 3d authoring tool.

Your arms will get very tired.

but authoring business logic is highly effective in Visual programming.

I disagree. We have one giant visual-programmed workflow solution and it's a very modern and powerful system but it's also insane to work with. You can describe the problem in text with much clearer than trying to follow a diagram that won't fit on a dozen screens in either direction.

Reason - Visual authoring tools are highly expensive and hence are confined to fortune 500 companies.

They are snake-oil; nearly something you can only sell for millions of dollars to people who make billions of dollars. You need a team of highly paid expert consultants to make changes because nobody else knows these systems or wants to know them. It's like going back 30 years in terms of expressive power.

mrslave• 10 years ago

Second. I am a competent programmer who degrades himself in the drudgery of business rules and visual ETL (DataStage, Informatica, etc.) and I do it only for the money.

So many of the problems are trivially solved with small programs, or even gasp just plain SQL. I concede there are features delivered by these fancy ETL tools beyond the quick (but not dirty) of custom solutions, but the overheads are higher too and I believe a cost-benefit analysis would invalidate the supposed business cases for using these tools.

This is not not-invented-here syndrome. This is simpler and cheaper. The problem for my case often is previous attempts to do it ourselves are shit. That's not a problem with the technology. :P

Behind the scenes I've solved hundreds of problems - one-off or on-going, small and large - by writing custom applications. This is the real increase in productivity that justifies my fee.

murukesh_s2• 10 years ago

Your arms will get very tired. Ha ha, What about voice? Even without fancy stuff like gesture or voice, actually it wont be tiring. In fact if you prefer to use keyboard, you can solely work using pure keyboard to perform all of the visual wiring using configured shortcuts. It would be then much less effort (in terms of typing) that in traditional coding, as you don't need to do any boilerplate coding.
I disagree. We have one giant visual-programmed workflow solution.

Why couldn't you break it up into multiple sub-workflows?

They are snake-oil

Agreed. we need great open source solutions to move the needle from where it's been stuck for over several decades.

vmorgulis• 10 years ago

No mention of the Deutsch limit:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deutsch_limit

gat-bitty• 10 years ago

I loved using labview when I was in test automation

musesum• 10 years ago

I think visual programming would match some problem domains very well, such as games (Unreal Blueprints), music (Reason, Max, PD), Neural Nets (???), UI (Quartz Composer), robotics (???), as well as the already mentioned spreadsheets. Most of these domains focus on flow and transition of scalars. The problem that I've had in the past with PD and MAX is in coordinating of multiple inputs that flow into a node. Sometimes I'd have to create a special node to properly sequence inputs. But, that is a limitation of the tool, not the idiom.

Another problem is how to explore and manipulate a flow graph? I like the idea of using a force directed graph. Here is one, where I mapped a visual music synthesizer to Jeffry Heer's Prefuse toolkit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a703TTbxghc

Would love to explore authoring flow, using force directed graphs on an iPad pro + pencil (and its ilk), where one could not only draw arc between nodes, but also between convex hulls of a collection of nodes.

n2dasun• 10 years ago

I used RAPTOR in a generic programming class at community college when trying to get into grad school 3.5 years ago. I was somewhat impressed with it, despite the bugs.

http://raptor.martincarlisle.com/

kelvin02• 10 years ago

I have many time mused at having visual elements integrated into your code, to better explain or schematize some concepts (which many times cannot be easily explained by mere comments). The future is not visual programming, it's augmented textual programming (ATP). You heard it here first folks.

GFK_of_xmaspast• 10 years ago

Gnu Radio Control is a perfectly fine visual language for its problem domain: http://www.joshknows.com/grc

rajatrocks• 10 years ago

I interned at VPL Research[1] in 1992 and they had a Mac-based VPL for controlling objects in VR called Body Electric[2] that was really fun to use - especially since I'd never seen anything like it. I implemented gravity for objects and a virtual arm using it. If I remember correctly, debugging could be a challenge. It was later interfaced with Macromedia Director[3] to control desktop apps.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VPL_Research

[2] http://www.jaronlanier.com/vpl.html

[3] http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/lang/bounce/bounce.html

AshleysBrain• 10 years ago

We use a visual programming system in our startup's game development tool Construct 2 [1].

We may not be Visual Basic big (yet!) but we're running a successful business on a visual programming IDE with lots of users who love it!

[1] https://www.scirra.com

blt• 10 years ago

Is there any visual programming language well-suited to implementing complex data structures like red-black trees? What about a recursive descent parser? File system?

I have not used visual languages extensively, but it seems like they are better suited to simple control flows with flat data structures and limited state mutation. This would explain their success for graphics shaders, audio, industrial control, etc.

Visual Programming Is Unbelievable (2015)

Related Stories