Re:NoFlo Kickstarter, the hacker's perspective
by 31reasons on Thursday August 01, 2013 @11:18PM
(#6145145)
Code at Compile time is a different entity than the Code at Runtime. Programmers learns to visualize expanding and collapsing data structures and the web of pointers and call-backs. One simple tiny recursive function can become a massively complex tree at runtime. These two complexities are similar yet very different. Any system that doesn't respect the runtime will fail to understand the mindset of a programmer. I hope they succeed in dealing with both.
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Re:NoFlo Kickstarter, the hacker's perspective
by werg on Friday August 02, 2013 @04:14AM
(#6145886)
Exactly this is the problem with grafting visual programming interfaces onto textual programming semantics. One of the main important reasons to do VP is to be able to inspect the code, to easier see what it does, ideally at a glance. Yet as you point out, simple recursion can make this really difficult to do. My thesis is that we need VPLs that have semantics specifically tailored for the visual interface. It's possible, but takes a bit of thinking to work out