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Re:PyFlow – Visual scripting framework for Python – NodeRED ... by bmitc on Sunday January 16, 2022 @08:21PM (#29962321)
> ASCII and Unicode are standards.

Right, and those didn't just materialize out of thin air. They took time and effort to develop. My point is that we shouldn't keep shooting down visual based tools and languages on the notion that there aren't standards, because there isn't anything (besides preconceived biases) that prevent them. There are many things that text is just not good at describing, such as dataflow, and by claiming everything must be text and isomorphic to text, we're holding things back.

Re:PyFlow – Visual scripting framework for Python – NodeRED ... by ethbr0 on Sunday January 16, 2022 @09:07PM (#29962610)
I'd be more sympathetic to this idea if I hadn't seen the tactic executed repeatedly over the last 10 years to ensure vendor lock-in, which ultimately burns the end user. And/or requires them to insecurely freeze a portion of their IT infrastructure in time.

And honestly, if your GUI/designer is standardized, then it's trivial to define a stable serialization to and from text anyway.

Re:PyFlow – Visual scripting framework for Python – NodeRED ... by z3ncyberpunk on Monday January 17, 2022 @10:05AM (#29967222)
You only need to sympathetic because you have let yourself become jaded by your anecdotal experience.
Re:PyFlow – Visual scripting framework for Python – NodeRED ... by ethbr0 on Monday January 17, 2022 @11:57AM (#29968577)
It didn't feel anecdotal when I was the one trying to modernize systems like these in the face of vendor apathy (or active hostility) and business resistance to change, because they had 10+ years of legacy "code" built in these things.
Re:PyFlow – Visual scripting framework for Python – NodeRED ... by z3ncyberpunk on Monday January 17, 2022 @12:57PM (#29969328)
So every other software project for every business ever? Got it, still anecdotal data