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Re:How I Switched to Plan 9 by lonelappde on Thursday December 05, 2019 @01:49AM (#21710456)
You mean like Scratch?

Everybody thinks they want that until they try it on a real non-toy problem.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intentional_programming

Re:How I Switched to Plan 9 by pjmlp on Thursday December 05, 2019 @02:01AM (#21710498)
As someone that also has a background in digital circuits tooling, I think that the problem is the spaghetti codding that usually leads to monoliths.

While on text based languages, lack of modularity is kind of hidden and only jumps at you when you try to actually change anything, on visual languages it jumps right at you when you open a project.

Ideally, anything that requires panning or zooming, should be packed into their own little reusable building block, instead many try to package as much as they can into a single screen.

Re:How I Switched to Plan 9 by disposedtrolley on Thursday December 05, 2019 @04:49AM (#21711106)
> While on text based languages, lack of modularity is kind of hidden and only jumps at you when you try to actually change anything, on visual languages it jumps right at you when you open a project.

I've worked on some projects using Node RED (https://nodered.org/) and have found this to be very true. It's painfully obvious that you're in for a fun ride when the code is literally spaghetti.

Re:How I Switched to Plan 9 by disposedtrolley on Thursday December 05, 2019 @04:41AM (#21711076)
No, not Scratch :P

I think programmers should be trusted to write code as text, but the IDE should in some way help visualise how data flows through the system.

Intentional programming seems interesting. Reminds me a little of BDD frameworks like Cucumber (https://cucumber.io/docs)