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thoughts from Ivan Reese's post:
- Max/MSP / PureData seems to be a local maximum
- most VPLs weaken naming - instead of giving names to things, you make connections between unnamed things
- VPLs require constant jumping between mouse and keyboard (something I tried solving with DAS-UI)
I don't think that the complexity issue (...) is essential. I think it's self-imposed by current visual language designers. Perhaps that's because the handful of visual languages that got traction (and thus the benefit of countless hours of design & development effort) are created for people who aren't computer scientists. These languages only need to be sufficient for solving a domain problem, not for advancing the art of the visual PL.
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some ideas/prompts from Ivan:
- use more of "visual" - borrow ideas from what designers are used to
- layers - like in Photoshop
- color-with-meaning - tags in Finder
- shapes-with-meaning - using shapes to represent types, etc.
- animation-with-meaning - step-debugger that plays things "slowly", Hest has even playback in reverse
- possibly allowing programmer to specify what meaning they want to attach to which visual representation
The fact that current visual languages are built of monochromatic text, a few box shapes, and a few colors of line, is a tremendous failure of imagination.
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other prompts:
- data-layers
- data-visualization / code-visualization (simulator, canvas for programming)
The problem with visual programming is that you can’t have more than 50 visual primitives on the screen at the same time.
— L. Peter Deutsch - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deutsch_limit
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I like how code is expressed as "layers", borrowing from graphical applications (some other interesting prompts in this direction in VPL Issues:
<script> export let inner = 0.5; export let outer = 0.75; export let vertices = 10; // ... <Props> <Slider label="Sides" bind:value={vertices} min={5} max={20} step={1} /> <Slider label="Inner Radius" bind:value={inner} min={0} max={2} step={0.01} /> <Slider label="Outer Radius" bind:value={outer} min={0} max={2} step={0.01} /> </Props>- related DAG and Tree Representations of Code, and the ideas of creating UIs based on that representation - toggling layers, moving them around, etc.
- VPLs seem like a good idea, but might not be
- this might also be related to "data lives here" idea, and VPL prompts from Ivan
- related to VPL Issues
