Mixing Visual and Textual Code

(arxiv.org)

44 points by doppioandante6 hours ago

3 comments

kitd1 hour ago
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.
- Towaway691 hour ago
 > The simple text editor has a lot to answer for when it comes to how we think about programmingI 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.
 - varjag50 minutes ago
 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.
Garlef29 minutes ago
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?
conartist64 hours ago
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...
- whatever12 hours ago
 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.
- lukan3 hours ago
 Can you elaborate?
 - conartist63 hours ago
 You won't find it in any of the academic literature because it's not an academic project: <a href="https://bablr.org/" rel="nofollow">https://bablr.org/</a>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.
 - lukan2 hours ago
 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?
 - conartist62 hours ago
 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.
 - Chu4eeno3 hours ago
 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.)
 - tudelo1 hour ago
 You can use images inline in Racket. Decidedly less esoteric :)