Visual Programming – Why It’s a Bad Idea

Re:Visual Programming – Why It’s a Bad Idea by jakelazaroff on Tuesday November 20, 2018 @01:49PM (#18496506)

Obviously these are sweeping statements, but the problem with this generalization is that successful DSLs become invisible because we take them for granted. Regular expressions are a DSL. SQL is a DSL. LaTeX is a DSL. The Wikipedia page on domain-specific languages even lists HTML as an example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain-specific_language#Examp...

With regard to LaTeX or HTML, you could even argue that their goals could be better accomplished with some sort of graphical interface, which sounds a lot like… visual programming!

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Re:Visual Programming – Why It’s a Bad Idea by henrikeh on Tuesday November 20, 2018 @03:03PM (#18497164)

Geometric constraint solvers are essentially graphical, declarative domain-specific languages for mechanical/physical design. As an example: http://solvespace.com/index.pl

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Re:Visual Programming – Why It’s a Bad Idea by kpil on Wednesday November 21, 2018 @02:56PM (#18505518)

I would argue that perhaps with the exception of regex, the examples you mentioned are excellent ideas that are awsome despite their suboptimal DSLs, and they would have been even better if their DSLs had been implemented as extensions in a Lisp-like language.

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