| > The schematic capture elements to connect up large blocks of HDL with a ton of I/O going everywhere are one of the few applications of visual programming that I like. Right. Trying to map lines of code to blocks 1 to 1 is a bad use of time. Humans seem to deal with text really well. The problem becomes when we have many systems talking to one another, skimming through text becomes far less effective. Being able to connect 'modules' or 'nodes' together visually(whatever those modules are) and rewire them seems to be a better idea. For a different take that's not circuit-based, see how shader nodes are implemented in Blender. That's not (as far as I know a) a Turing complete language, but it gives one idea how you can connect 'nodes' together to perform complex calculations: https://renderguide.com/blender-shader-nodes-tutorial/ A more 'general purpose' example is the blueprint system from Unreal Engine. Again we have 'nodes' that you connect together, but you don't create those visually, you connect them to achieve the behavior you want: https://dev.epicgames.com/documentation/en-us/unreal-engine/... > I don't think there's many analogous situations in typical programming applications that call for timing diagrams Not 'timing' per se (although those exist), but situations where you want to see changes over time across several systems are incredibly common, but existing tooling is pretty poor for that. |