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by quangio 2766 days ago
I personally think node based programming is suitable for DSL, high level plumbing, data visualization (imagine Jupyter cells but having branches). The best visual programming language is UE4 Blueprint: prototype quickly, great debugging experience (great tooling in general), communicate with C++ easily, intellisense... It's really productive to glue stuff together but not that helpful for "drawing" all the core logic. VSP is good but not for every use-cases.
1 comments

Exactly this. The best example here is NodeRed, Javascript underneath and a dataflow UI on top.

You can get connectors for pretty much anything eg. Raspberry pi robot/ home automation, twitter, http, email, mqtt, SQL, openCV, parallel processing.

The dashboard allows you to create UIs visually, and I've ported it to run on Android + IOS:

https://github.com/alexisread/noreml

EDIT: Ran out of time to finish the comment:

Allowing this to run on mobile means that you can develop/monitor systems on mobile, cluster the systemsphone with other nodered instances, and develop mobile apps (the package is basically nodeJs, nodered and a cordova webview which can be hooked up to display the nodered dashboard).

The important things to note here are that the underlying language to the visual DSL is flexible enough to do everything, and standard ways of building visual extensions (aka nodes) exist.

The main thing missing on the Dashboard is a table node, which would allow a much more flexible layout of data (sorting, trees etc).