Mixing Visual and Textual Code

Visual languages often fail when it comes to concurrent development where the state of the art is textual diff and merge. The IBM Rational suite attempted visual model diff/merge but I recall it being unworkable in practice.

Modern collaborative visual tools like Miro sidestep the concurrent development problem by being live multiplayer and by essentially having no version management at all.

Most visual BPM tools that I'm aware of try to mix flowchart style programming with e.g. Javascript on activity nodes, but they fail provide any developer-time syntax checking or completion. They also tend to serialise to XML which is unworkable in practice for diff/merge of the visual logic.

In a previous job we had an in-house flowchart based language that embedded Javascript. We put the effort into writing a first-class Eclipse plugin that had syntax checking and completion across all graphical and Javascript constructs. It even had interactive debugging that interleaved graphical and textual single-stepping. We never solved the diff/merge problem in a satisfactory way.

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kitd 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

A very long time ago I wrote an Eclipse plug in that would read from source comments an ascii diagram describing the state/transition flow of a java class object, and generate/update the necessary state fields and transition methods.

It was pretty cool in principle but nearly unworkable in practice, purely because maintaining an ascii diagram in a text editor for anything more than "Hello world" is a massive PITA.

The simple text editor has a lot to answer for when it comes to how we think about programming, in a Sapir-Whorf kind of way. It's a shame there has been no cast iron standard for mixing live text and visuals. Our industry might look very different.

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Towaway69 2 hours ago | parent [-]

> The simple text editor has a lot to answer for when it comes to how we think about programming

I wonder whether those that used punch cards said the same about those punch cards?

It’s weird how our mobile devices aren’t programmed using keyboards/text as input devices. Or our microwaves. Or refrigerators.

Programmers are stuck with text because their programming paradigms are stuck in a text-based paradigm, hence AIs spew out reams and reams of simple to understand text.

There is definite room for improvements and room for keyboards. However the focus should move on from keyboard to mouse to XR environments using 3D glasses. Our programming paradigms have to move aswell.

Using a visual first paradigm means using higher level constructs, things such as Blockly from Google isn’t a good example of visual programming. For music, things such as noisecraft are. For more general programming approach, Node-RED is a good example of visual programming based on flow based programming paradigm which is well suited to visual programming.

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Joker_vD 42 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

> I wonder whether those that used punch cards said the same about those punch cards?

Oh, absolutely. One statement/line per card, the first 5 columns reserved for labels (how's that for significant whitespace?), the 6th to signal line continuation, the last eight for arbitrary comments/line numbers? People loathed it.

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varjag 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I can assure that mobile devices and embedded systems are programmed with text and keyboards as well.

As a small challenge you could try expressing the contents of your comment using visuals only.

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Joker_vD an hour ago | parent [-]

> As a small challenge you could try expressing the contents of your comment using visuals only.

Hah! That's a trick question, isn't it, because HN filters out emojis?

	▲	varjag 34 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		I mean just as an exercise. Also, emojis (as well as hieroglyphics ) are still text.

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Garlef an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Hm...the screenshots don't really sell it;

Maybe the authors should just vibe code a cljs port and put it in a browser?

And showcase some program written in this language that sells it better?

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conartist6 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Oh dear. I think they may fall over in surprise when they realize that this technology become commercially viable while they were busy writing this academic paper...

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whatever1 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I mean visual programming is standard in game development. Did not get traction in the rest of the dev community.

Now it does not matter anyways. We are not reading/ writing code anymore. Just specifying it and testing it.

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lukan 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Can you elaborate?

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conartist6 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

You won't find it in any of the academic literature because it's not an academic project: https://bablr.org/

BABLR is just the extensible streaming parser framework, but it has a few key things going for it: 1. Gap support like Hazel has, but for any language it can parse 2. Streaming parse results, which make multi-pass stream transformation easy 3. The ability to consolidate and take over the work currently done by Treesitter, LSP, Git, and the IDE itself.

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lukan 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

So bablr is from you?

"BABLR is a parser framework roughly comparable to Tree-sitter, but built from the ground up for the web"

I have to admit, I don't know why I would stop using my wasm build of treesitter that works amazing on the web for something that is "conditionally production ready". Also I don't see where your project mixed visual and textual code like this paper here explores?

	▲	conartist6 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Yeah it's by me. It isn't the purpose of the project to be able to make visual widgets, just an ability that arises naturally when your state layer holds both structure and text.

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IshKebab 28 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

That does not look like a visual programming language?

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Chu4eeno 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I assume he's referring to the massive commercial success of Holy-C and TempleOS.

(It's the only programming language with inline graphics I can think of, at least, your average esoteric visual language tend to not mix with normal code.)

	▲	tudelo 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		You can use images inline in Racket. Decidedly less esoteric :)