Drakon – A visual language for specifications from the Russian space program

http://drakon-editor.sourceforge.net/

by throwaway344 • 13 years ago

126 28 13 years ago

drakon-editor.sourceforge.net

adamnemecek• 13 years ago

http://drakon-editor.sourceforge.net/inseption.png

I like how it says "Your drawing looks good". Why doesn't gcc ever compliment my code?

thejosh• 13 years ago

It does, perhaps it doesn't think your code is good enough?

kazagistar• 13 years ago

The tragic consequencesvof the unix philosophy of silence on success.

fspeech• 13 years ago

Would it still be a compliment if it came from stderr?

felixgallo• 13 years ago

clearly we need a stdaffirmation.

raintrees• 13 years ago

Hey, maybe we will get to ObjectVision all over again, only this time it can work! Or continue to be developed, at least.

I remember putting in around 30 hours on a consulting project trying to use ObjectVision 2.1 (I think that was the version - been a while) before finally giving up and going to FoxPro in disgust... Had to keep project deadlines.

dchest2• 13 years ago

A year ago I wrote TEA cipher implementation with it for fun:

https://github.com/dchest/drakon-tea

(Pictures: https://github.com/dchest/drakon-tea/tree/master/pics)

It was painful.

jonahx2• 13 years ago

What was painful about it? Was the language itself cumbersome to use, or was it the problem with the graphical editor software?

dchest2• 13 years ago

The language is actually C (you can also use Python, etc. I think the original underlying language was a variant of Oberon). The painful part was the graphical editor, or, I'd say, the idea of using graphics for programming instead of text. Imagine aligning all these rectangles and then realizing that you got a part of algorithm wrong: now you'll have to realign everything!

I think it would be much easier to edit some textual representation, and then use a program to convert it to the graphical one, if you want to read it this way.

eonil• 13 years ago

Reminds me the Macromedia Authorware.

dedosk• 13 years ago

Out of curiosity -- are there any better open-source or commercial alternatives to this type of software?

edtechdev• 13 years ago

One recent one is NoFlo http://noflojs.org/

A well established one for kids & novices is Scratch: http://scratch.mit.edu/

And you can see some other javascript-based visual programming tools here: https://github.com/jashkenas/coffee-script/wiki/List-of-lang...

burstmode• 13 years ago

20 years ago, during the peak of the CASE hype, there used to be several others.Borland ObjectVision, IBM VisualAge, Siemens EasyCase were some of them. Problem of all this tools is: It's proven that they don't scale. The sample programms that come with them all look nice and tidy, but god beware if you have to solve some real problem with real error handling. Right now Matlab Simulink&Stateflow (+some kind of code generator) is the only system usable for fingerpainting programms of significant size.

techdragon• 13 years ago

This has sat in my bookmarks far too long. Visual programming techniques are very different and vastly under developed compared to the plethora of other 'toy languages' that get more development.

jonahx2• 13 years ago

Gotta love software docs that show getting drunk on various amounts of vodka as an explanation of their select statement!

This actually looks useful -- the simple set of rules they suggest make a lot of sense for general flowchart readability, and these could be easily shared with business partners of only a half-technical mindset.

I was curious how you would handle event driven architectures with it, however -- or is that outside the intended scope?

VladRussian2• 13 years ago

if you like events driven and distributed - that evokes old memories of SDL-88/92 - a product of sober European sleep of reason,a graphical Erlang.

worldsayshi• 13 years ago

Upvoted because I'm a strong believer in visual programming languages. But also a bit underwhelmed. Flowcharts are useful I guess.

mojuba• 13 years ago

Strictly speaking all programming languages are visual. Except ones are much easier to write because typing on a computer today is way faster than drawing.

Once drawing becomes more productive (which I don't see exactly how, to be honest) then diagram-based languages will raise their heads. Until then, no, thank you.

cateye• 13 years ago

I hear already recruiters ask: "Do you know Drakon?". Just like when it was the default to insert UML in every job listing.

edent• 13 years ago

I've been using it for a while and documented my experiences at http://shkspr.mobi/blog/2013/04/use-drakon-to-generate-code-...

RamiK• 13 years ago

I thought this is just a toy until I read your blog. Now I'm actually looking into playing around with it a little... Thanks.

al2o3cr• 13 years ago

In Soviet Russia, charts flow YOU!

But seriously, these look just like the flowcharts that were all over CS in the seventies. And the code that's generated (based on the examples from edent and dchest) is basically unmaintainable GOTO-hell that looks like what you get from decompiling code without symbols...

I'd be curious to see what gets generated for the parallelism stuff, tho.

telephonetemp• 13 years ago

Sounds like a great tool for programming numerical algorithms. You get the code and a flowchart for your paper all at once.

bcoates• 13 years ago

Is there a textual input representation to go along with the visual analysis one? I love using flowcharts to explain and comprehend complicated things, but the UIs for actually drafting them haven't quite made it into the 1960s yet and are painful as hell. Going from the video, this tool is better than most but still lots of modal button-hunting and handle-dragging and manual alignment.

The .drn file format is a SQLite database but it looks like it encodes the coordinates of the elements directly rather than storing symbolic relationships and doing a layout. If you could use a Graphviz-like language to describe the diagrams but add the Drakon rules for structure and layout (and presentation) I'd be a lot more enthusiastic.

singold• 13 years ago

I think this is great for getting non-technical stakeholders into the development process.

Nearly anyone should be able to understand a flowchart and also make improvements and understand why that feature is more or less difficult to implement.

I know this isnt new, but really liked it

ternaryoperator• 13 years ago

Very interesting, although I am somewhat surprised that given its knowledge of the logic, it doesn't generate tests.

Drakon – A visual language for specifications from the Russian space program

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