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by Nzen 709 days ago
I think that it is probably worth addressing what sort of textual visualization you have in mind. That way, you could disabuse people with naive notions like myself.

I've not used a visual programming language and unit is (currently) hugged to death. But, my experience with graphviz's dot syntax would suggest putting a comment on the (textual) line that represents the edge itself:

  digraph whatever {
    running [ shape = "triangle" label = "program running" ]; # comment on the node itself
    stopped;
    running -> stopped; # comment about the edge
    stopped -> running;
  }
I acknowledge, though, that I'm thinking of this as a dsp-style situation, where a node only connects at its boundaries, rather than in the center (say if a node contains code that would link to another as part of an if expression's body).

(Also, I'm disappointed that I need to resist the urge to talk about Bob Nystom's visual pdf diff, because it seems really cool but is not as credible as the edge directive above. https://journal.stuffwithstuff.com/2021/07/29/640-pages-in-1... , scroll to 3/4 where it says "Here is what all of the proofreading changes look like:")
1 comments
vidarh 709 days ago
> I acknowledge, though, that I'm thinking of this as a dsp-style situation, where a node only connects at its boundaries, rather than in the center (say if a node contains code that would link to another as part of an if expression's body).

I think that might well be one of those restricted situations where visual programming often works well enough that it seems some use. I'm absolutely not saying it can't ever work.

My problem with it is more when you try to do more general-purpose things with it, and you e.g. either end up with a node per method/function call (and maybe then even nodes for argument expressions) or large, complex nodes with internal logic.

I love dot for graphs, but the challenge to me with that approach is that I've not seen a convincing example where you'd then not end up with a mountain of text for even very simple things (and I've sinned badly there myself - one of my own early attempts serialised to XML...) when you decompose the text enough that you can augment it reliably.

E.g. consider a complex expression where that edge is not just a simple state transition, but a method call with arguments, where each argument itself might be a complex expression...

Every attempt I made myself ended up with a textual version that was too verbose to feel viable for communication about the code unless I stripped out so much that the visual tooling effectively became a tool to analyse the textual version, rather than allowing editing on equal footing.

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