visual-programming-codex

If you want to check out the motherlode of other visual programming languages, platforms, etc check out Ivan Reese's Visual Programming Codex. https://github.com/ivanreese/visual-programming-codex https://github.com/ivanreese/visual-programming-codex/blob/m... Although I'm going to have to create a pull request because he doesn't have Flowgorithm on there, which is an excellent tool for teaching the very very first steps of learning to program... http://flowgorithm.org/ Terrible name, wonderful tool.

I'm going to throw a vote in here for Grasshopper, the visual programming language in Rhino3d as doing it the right way. It is WIDELY used in architectural education and practice alike. Unfortunately, most visuals you'll get of the populated canvas online are crap. And for those of us who make extremely clean readable programs it's kind of a superpower and we tend to be careful with how widely we spread them. But once you see a good one you get the value immediately. Here's a good simple program I made, as a sample. [0] Also, I want to give a shout-out to the Future of Coding community in this. The Whole Code Catalog [1] and Ivan Reese's Visual Programming Codex [2] are great resources in the area. I also have to mention, despite the awful name, Flowgorithm is an EXCELLENT tool for teaching the fundamentals of procedural thinking. [3] One

Nice! Have you explored showing live values flowing through the nodes? This seems like a good use of animation. I'll also take a moment to plug my Visual Programming Codex[1], which collects VPLs as though they're butterflies. I'm adding Flyde to the backlog of projects to document, but I'd also suggest looking around there for ideas. There are a ton of valuable new things you can do once you start visualizing programming, especially if you're visualizing the execution behaviour. I'd love to see you push this further. [1] https://github.com/ivanreese/visual-programming-codex

Mynatt analyzed whiteboard use in 1999's "The Writing on the Wall" [1], which led to an interactive whiteboard system called Flatland [2], but it's not focused on programming. More recent, detailed, and programming-specific is "How Software Designers Interact with Sketches at the Whiteboard" [3]. I had thought I remembered a site with a more thorough treatment of this, but I might have just been thinking of the sprawling Visual Programming Codex: https://github.com/ivanreese/visual-programming-codex [1] http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.13.... (PDF) [2] https://ecl.cc.gatech.edu/sites/default/files/publications/C... (PDF) [3] https://cs.gmu.edu/~tlatoza/papers/tse15-sketching.pdf (PDF)

After taking a quick look at existing visual scripting tools[0], it seems like the main feature differentiating this from the others is that the nodes are code modules instead of primitives. I think this is where visual programming can really shine, write modules in a text editor and then wire them up in a visual editor. This gives you the high level, conceptual view of the program flow without the excessively verbose visual spaghetti of wiring up individual operations and control flow statements. I think UE4's blueprints can work this way as well, writing a new node in C++ and then wiring it up, but they're not really portable to the wider development ecosystem. [0] https://github.com/ivanreese/visual-programming-codex/blob/m...

For completeness, here https://github.com/ivanreese/visual-programming-codex is a pretty comprehensive list of different takes on visual/flow based programming through the ages…

You may enjoy: http://github.com/ivanreese/visual-programming-codex

You'll find that link, and a few other great ones like it, on the "Reflections" page of my codex: https://github.com/ivanreese/visual-programming-codex/blob/m... My favourite is the "Gallery of Programmer Interfaces" by Jonathan Edwards: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1MD-CgzODFWzdpnYXr8bE... I can also heartily recommend following Edwards on Twitter: https://twitter.com/jonathoda

Plug — for anyone researching or otherwise interested in visual languages like Luna, I keep a collection of projects, papers, talks, references, and other related media here on Github: https://github.com/ivanreese/visual-programming-codex As for Luna, it seems like they've gone quiet for the past while, though I believe they're still hard at work on the project. Hopefully they can improve the stability and performance of the program, because to date I've found it almost unusable. For a similarly interesting project (albeit not visual in the same way), I recommend people also take a look a isomorƒ: https://isomorf.io

I consider myself a serious programmer (fond of Clojure, Haskell, writing hyper-performant graphics code, etc). I'm also very fond of visual languages, so much so that I started collecting and cataloging all the noteworthy examples of them I came across in my research travels: https://github.com/ivanreese/visual-programming-codex Yes, the vast majority of visual languages are uninspired and underdeveloped. But the same is true of text languages — look at Pascal or xBase or C++ templates. Yes, it's possible to make a terrible mess in a visual language. But the same is true of text languages — we had to learn the hard way not to goto, not to do TCL style string-based metaprogramming. When we think of the greatness of text languages, we're thinking of Idris and APL and Racket, not the Java you see on The Daily WTF. When we think of visual la