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by sbensu 699 days ago
[post author] I agree. On many domains you can find a great mapping between some visual representation and how the developer (beginner or not) wants to think about the problem.

I personally don't see any one pictorial representation that maps to a general programming language. But if someone does find one, in the large and in the small, that'd be great!
2 comments
vvanders 699 days ago
Not even all textual languages map well to every problem space.

Blueprints are a good callout(and Kismet before them). Many PLCs[1] are heavily visual language based with Ladder, FBD or other variants. I wouldn't be surprised if they were the most widely used application of visual programming languages.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programmable_logic_controller

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topspin 698 days ago
> I personally don't see any one pictorial representation that maps to a general programming language.

I agree. What I've had in mind for a while now is very different from this.

What I envision is "text" in the sense that it's not a diagram, but more advanced textual representation. Over hundreds of years mathematicians have evolved a concise, unambiguous, symbolic notation for formulae, yet programmers are still using tools that are backward compatible with dot matrix terminals from the 60's: simple characters used to write lines in files.

Blocks, conditions, iteration, exits (return, exception, etc.,) pipelines, assignment, type and other common concepts could be represented symbolically. The interface would still be text-like, but the textual representation would be similar to mathematical notation, where the basic constructs of code are depicted as common, well understood, dynamically drawn symbols that programmers deeply inculcate.

Key properties include extreme concision and clarity of the "instruction pointer." Concision is crucial to reduce the cognitive cost of large amounts of logic. The latter is a thing that is entirely obscured in most visual programming schemes and also absent from conventional mathematical notation: the location of the current instruction is absolutely crucial to understanding logic.

I wish I had more time to elaborate what I have in mind, much less actually work on it.

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