Re:Ask HN: Why isn’t visual programming a bigger thing?
by adrianN on Thursday May 21, 2020 @04:21AM
(#23256026)
I'm not thinking of the AST, but of a graph of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_block
Re:Ask HN: Why isn’t visual programming a bigger thing?
by gridlockd on Thursday May 21, 2020 @04:22AM
(#23256031)
You didn't answer the question. ASTs are not DAGs, they are just trees. They also do not represent the computation, but the language syntax.
Many visual programming languages are based around DAGs and they do represent the computation itself. The edges are usually not nodes either, so those DAGs are not hypergraphs.
The point I wanted to make was that no matter what design choice you make as a language author, to make this DAG/AST as palatable for the end user, be it with a imperative, functional, logic or concatenive style of programming, a price is aways payed, in terms of complexity at some level (time, space, ergonomics), no matter what you do.