| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26112751 Here's an example of a thread where somebody was fruitlessly trying to argue that a spreadsheet isn't a visual programming language: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22984831 >lmm 9 months ago | on: Maybe visual programming is the answer, maybe not >If there was a visual programming language with anywhere near the popularity of Ruby, I'd be willing to consider that maybe the idea has some merit. >DonHopkins 9 months ago [–] >Excel. >I could turn your argument around: If Ruby were anywhere near as popular, widely used, and successful as Excel, I'd be willing to consider that maybe the idea that Ruby is a viable programming language has some merit. >But I won't, because whether or not something is a visual programming language isn't up to a popularity contest. >Can you come up with a plausible definition of visual programming languages that excludes Excel, without being so hopelessly contrived and gerrymandered that it also arbitrarily excludes other visual programming languages? [...] (TL;DR: he couldn't, since he was under the mistaken impression that Excel not programmable, and was less popular than Ruby...) That thread was on an earlier discussion about a blog posting from 2020 about the same 1989 paper by Brad Myers that we're currently discussing. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22978454 https://blog.metaobject.com/2020/04/maybe-visual-programming... >Maybe Visual Programming is The Answer. Maybe Not >Whenever discussing problems with programming today and potential solutions, invariably someone will pop up and declare that the problem is obviously the fact that programs are linear text and if only programming were visual, all problems would immediately disappear in some unspecified way. >I understand the attraction of visual programming, particularly for visual thinkers. However, it's not as if this hasn't been tried, with so far very limited success. Brad Myers, in his 1989 paper Taxonomies of Visual Programming gave, along with the titular taxonomy, a non-exhaustive summary of the problems, starting with visual languages in general: [...] |