Re:Ask HN: Why isn’t visual programming a bigger thing?
by tiborsaas on Thursday May 21, 2020 @03:07AM
(#23255621)
So writes are painters too because they have eyes? In a sense yes, but it's not what most people would accept.
> What can you do with a visual language that is much easier than text?
Experiment an order of magnitude faster than you with text. What might take me 2s with a UI might take you 20s in text ore more. You also don't have to care about coding style, naming a ton of variables (just your nodes) so it removes lots of boilerplate.
Visual programming is usually domain specific so the UI fine tuned towards a certain problem. So comparing C++ for example to Max/Msp is missing the point. Visual programming is about solving domain specific problems while text based programming is general (to an extent... don't write device drivers in PHP).
> What can you do with a visual language that is much easier than text?
Experiment an order of magnitude faster than you with text. What might take me 2s with a UI might take you 20s in text ore more. You also don't have to care about coding style, naming a ton of variables (just your nodes) so it removes lots of boilerplate.
Visual programming is usually domain specific so the UI fine tuned towards a certain problem. So comparing C++ for example to Max/Msp is missing the point. Visual programming is about solving domain specific problems while text based programming is general (to an extent... don't write device drivers in PHP).