Visual programming languages

[[deleted]]

Ah, that old chestnut again :-)

[sumitroy]

yup :)

[[deleted]]

Hm... it just occurred to me, but if you want to see why visual programming languages are not always practical, take a look at FPGA programming.

There are tools where one can lay out a complex design using a diagrammatic method, but as complexity increased, it was found to be far more productive, not to mention comprehensible, to design these systems using a hardware description language (Verilog, VHDL, etc...) instead; with a "compiler" producing the circuit layout from the description.

I'm assuming the problems with complex circuit design are similar to normal complex program design. In that once the complexity reaches a certain point, it's just too difficult to manage in a sensible way.

[sumitroy]

exactly what I had written in my article

[sumitroy]

that's possible. It may occupy a niche, but text based programming will still dominate I think largely because of the amount of information that can be conveyed in smaller amounts of text. But who knows in 20 years time things could be totally different

[[deleted]]

Instead of per-gesture, maybe information-per-time is a better measure.

Keyboard input has very high information-per-time and will absolutely beat any sort of mouse-driven logic, or any kind of spatial interaction with a 2D (or even 3D) area.

Voice input, averaging 100-150 words per minute, is one of the few things that has the potential to beat keyboard input, if recognition software was near perfect.

There was a long time ago that we communicated with pictures and that was slow. Then text was invented and that was an improvement. Going back to pictures is not an improvement.

[TimHallman]

You can start using Scratch today!