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by yaxu 5010 days ago
As Bret Victor says in his essay, live coding is not a new concept and he did not create it.

The current trend in live coding seems to have spawned from a discussion between two computer musicians (Fabrice Mogini and Julian Rohrhuber) in 2001, with masses of related prior art going back to Lisp machines, Self, Smalltalk, corewar etc.
1 comments
seanmcdirmid 5010 days ago
Responsive live programming (not just code reload), which is closer to what Bret Victor is doing here, goes back to various visual languages of the 80s and 90s.
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yaxu 5010 days ago
Like the ones I mentioned.
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seanmcdirmid 5010 days ago
You didn't mention any VPLs. I would throw in a few...ThingLab, AgentSheets, LabView, Prograph, Fabrik, and so on. These were the original live languages.
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yaxu 5009 days ago
Self is certainly one. http://selflanguage.org/documentation/published/programming-...

But why do you think liveness requires visual programming? I see them as pretty much orthogonal.

Separately, when I see "visual programming language" I see "unusual programming language". When language features become normal (like 2D syntax in Python/haskell), then we stop calling them visual. A great deal of visual features are just alternative ways of structuring text, ways of constraining syntax, or ways of constructing high dimensional (and therefore non-visual) graphs. To a large extent, all programming languages are visual.

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seanmcdirmid 5009 days ago
Why would you call Self a visual language? It has an IDE, but the language is most definitely textual. Its only when you throw in Morphic does the line begin to blur, but you are back to text again if you want to write any code. Many languages we think of as visual are more structured or graphical (graphics baked around text); compare ToonTalk to Scratch! Most languages fall somewhere in a spectrum between heavily visual and heavily textual, but this is my own classification system and there is hardly much consensus on the topic.

Liveness doesn't require visual, of course, but that's where liveness first shows up in history (SketchPad, along with directness). I go into some of the history in my own paper on the topic (http://lamp.epfl.ch/~mcdirmid/mcdirmid07dead.pdf).

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yaxu 5009 days ago
I haven't actually used Self, but from reading the paper, discussion of embodiment, tangible objects, and direct manipulation makes it interesting from a visual perspective.

Personally I think all computer languages are textual by definition, and vary in the amount of extra visual support for syntax and more often secondary notation. The Reactable perhaps pushes beyond this limit by making proximity and orientation part of the syntax, but still is basically about composing textual symbols.

If we're doing that thing, I wrote a chapter on this in my thesis :) http://yaxu.org/thesis/

[ For the benefit of any others, here's a link to Sean's preprint: http://lamp.epfl.ch/~mcdirmid/mcdirmid07live.pdf ]

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