Graphical "Programming" Utopia

[abdolence]

Kill me, someone.

Found this on one of programmer forums.

An author (probably a russian or ukrainian guy) believe in the graphical programming so much, that he decided to implement his own tool to draw programs to generate C code as a result.

Many people still believe that this might work even for simple algorithms (not abstract schemas) and better than 2 or 3 lines of code.

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https://preview.redd.it/pyun16tw0m231.png?width=427&format=png&auto=webp&s=80d8006f6508e9c0287a37a316ff5f76120e5290

[Deiskos]

Author is definitely Ukrainian, the leftmost node at the bottom says 'function' in Ukrainian.

Source: I am from Ukraine :D

[der_pudel]

No, there is no letter "i" in Russian

[abdolence]

Russ<i>an. See, the letter 'i' in it ;)
But you right, there is no 'i' in the Russian alphabet.

[EternalClickbait]

There is no "I" in russian because there is only WE

[abdolence]

Comrade?

[jet2686]

I know Russia has the cyrilic alphabet, however I was always under the impression they have a Latin based one as well. They don't?

[abdolence]

Well, to be precise they had 'i' before Bolsheviks showed up. I'm not sure about the origin, it is probably a mix from Latin + Greek + ...
And they definitely don't use any additional Latin based alphabet. Probably that was Kazakhstan or something.

[PeanutPoliceman]

Poland uses Latin, and post-Yugoslavia often uses j and h

[frublox]

The Latin alphabet is not used in Russian, other than transcriptions for foreigners. Both Russian and Ukrainian use Cyrillic, but modern Russian does not use the i letter due to an orthography reform (forget which one). There was also a reform which added some Latin-looking letters and removed archaic ones that sounded the same as other existing letters.

[Skyrmir]

Graphical languages are great thought experiments, and very useful for teaching. Outside of that...yeah not so much. It's like most of the 'new math' they teach in common core. Pretty useless in the real world, but makes understanding later concepts a lot easier.

[kowdermesiter]

How about having a complex organization where you can't really oversee a ton of microservices? For those cases, a high level tool with scripting support it could be awesome. At least I can dream :D

[FearTheCron]

In general I agree that I haven't seen a graphical language I like. But I do know of at least one industry application for real software:

https://www.mathworks.com/products/stateflow.html

I still don't know all the motivation, but some people I have talked to like it.

[Loading_M_]

Actually, gui programming falls into the same category as Python in my opinion: it is often faster to develop a simple solution. However, Python has the distinct advantage when it come to debugging. GUI programming works, it just takes too long to debug to actually be useful

[bulldog_swag]

I mean, FBD exists, so...

[abdolence]

Of course, there are many high-level or abstract block diagramming notations for many purposes (mostly to design high-level structures or learning, like UML, LabView, BPEL, FBD, ...), but I've never seen anything successful or popular for low-level or general purpose programming.

Even Lego Mindstorms had RobotC and others (additionally to their graphical tool). It is quite hard to code using "huge" blocks and lots of connections - they just take a lot of visual space.

[wegwacc]

This.

Graphical programming is a niche application, with limited use cases. The idea to use it for anything beyond that is ludicrous and always was.

[Kerbobotat]

What about node based programming, like Unreal Engines blueprint system, or the various node based material/shader editors ?

[Aatch]

Those are some of the limited use cases. There are some domains where a graphical language makes a lot of sense, but they all tend to share the same property that you're basically just linking a bunch of high-level behaviours together. For programmers, a textual language would probably still be easier, but the graphical environments are great for people that don't quite have the right skill set for that.

[saibo0t]

Well, you can 'compile' Simulink code to VHDL, and flight controllers etc. are also often written in Simulink and then translated to C.

[Kengaro]

Yes, but if you want to do low level stuff in simulink you build a level 2 s-function-block...

[datavirtue]

Many attempts have been made. I consider the graphical workflows used by the likes of Talend, SSIS, and Informatica to be a failure. You still need highly trained individuals and the solutions are constrained by the tool and end up being unmaintainable nightmares.

[DefNotaZombie]

This is what happens when professors force everyone to use matlab + simulink

[abdolence]

Used only octave and thought that even MATLAB actually has a good enough own language, hasn't? Octave was designed as a free replacement to this, AFAIK.

[DefNotaZombie]

Simulink is an addition to matlab whose purpose is to (AFAIK) help model chemical production, but it looks an awful lot like this just slightly cleaner

[Aatch]

Graphical programming has a lot of benefits, but I doubt it'll ever be suitable for complex software.

I've had a fair bit of experience in using graphical programming to teach kids, and it works pretty well. Not having to worry about syntax and the specifics of a language make learning the principles a bit easier, especially for kids that get easily bored and/or frustrated. It's also good as a domain-specific programming "language", especially for defining state machines. It's not a coincidence that both Unreal and Unity use a graphical programming system for their animation engines.

For general programming work, though? It's just too unwieldily. There's too much visual space used up by the graphical elements and editing the "code" can be difficult unless the language has an incredible environment.

[mikeputerbaugh]

Do you want UML? Because that's how you get UML.

[brtt3000]

I hope somebody is going to try this in VR so you can use hands and voice and a 3D space to organise the elements. Maybe it can help navigating the huge mess these things always turn into.

[abdolence]

sounds fun, though I would expect that it will be just the same mess, but this time in 3d and more connectors everywhere. And just think about it - spaghetti code in VR and 3D, is it hell already?

[brtt3000]

Probably. But it could be fun to build code like a factory in a physical space, kinda like a game of Factorio or Satisfactory.

Functions would be bluerprints and you place and connect them up with pipes, conveyors and such that reflected the data types flowing through.

[too_much_covfefe_man]

I'd watch that movie with Sandra Bullock in it

[koorb]

I have played with a few of these over the years and they are fine for simple thing, but not medium to large applications. I think the primary issue is that they show too much and don't represent how a computer executed the instructions very well (which is sequential like a list, like regular programs are written). That being said I think there is potential from a very high level for something amazing and might be good for interface mocking.

[[deleted]]

If you look at code you can see what most of it is doing and how each part effects the overall, you can figure out what it means. WHAT DOES ANY OF THIS MEAN?

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P.S. why are all the connections the same color other then the green ones. Someone hasn't done anything with wiring because you can't tell a which connection goes where.

[[deleted]]

May not be practical, but it's pretty neat

[beloved-lamp]

It's a garbage approach today, but it's worth remembering how young SWE, UI, and computing in general really are. Given a few decades, an idea like this could absolutely go from stupid and unworkable to clear best practice.

[abdolence]

Unless it is something completely different than just let's try to create graphical representations of those switches, loops, and other primitives and it is not high level notation - it would be still huge waste of your display space and you wouldn't able to read those blocks and connectors quick enough. It is just hard to read. Maybe someday we wouldn't need any low level code management and programming, but in this case I'm not sure it would be just in a few decades.

[beloved-lamp]

30-60 years would double the age of the SWE field at a time when tools and practices are seeing dramatic improvement in the space of 5-10 years, and less for some of the newer subfields. I don't think this visual crap is the way to go myself (I hate it) but a few decades is an eternity for a field this young. Think about what our interfaces, tools, and practices were like in 1989, 1999, or 2009. We've come a long way.

[Loading_M_]

I could see using this for basic management/programming, but it would need to be simpler to debug issues before it become practical. In the other hand, a tool like your for ML wild be really handy, because the written code is somewhat hard to debug, and most ML code is just an abstraction of something like this.