Pretty much like how scratch works but for actual stuff outside of games.
Thanks in advance.
In: 9
That was what Excel spreadsheets used to be used for?
It’s just a slower way to type out a program, sure it might look simpler but that’s just because it shows everything that you can do in an easy to see way, typing it out while already knowing what you can do is much faster
LabView by National Instruments. Been around for years. LEGO mindstorms is a reskinned version of it. JPL (NASA) has been using it for decades.
Maintenance is your answer. It takes an extra layer of the gui to write the script.
So you might as well programing directly in the text based language & save some hassle. Now their are niche applications where visualizing is helpful & in those moments you will see some GUI layer but in my experience that is usually more of a “what data is where?” Instead of an actual like programing script.
Visual programing is great for learning the “parts” of programing but once you learn those you don’t need the visual anymore.
Now
It isn’t easier or better.
Computer languages are a dime a dozen, many a computer science student has been assigned the implementation of a novel programming language of their own design as a semester project in a compiler theory course.
The things that survive and are used everyday are the most efficient 0.01% of the programming language ideas.
Visual-based programming is only faster if you don’t know the language/syntax and aren’t familiar with software engineering concepts. Programming in this way is easier to *learn* for someone who doesn’t know how to program, but it’s harder to do precisely what you want to do.
It’s also typically too generalized to be useful in high performance applications. The visual coding blocks can only do specific things they are programmed to do…they can have variable input that changes some internals of the visual blocks, but every single action you want to perform must be pre-programmed.
Think of it like Reddit and its subreddits. You can make a brand new subreddit for whatever you want as long as it doesn’t break the rules of Reddit. You can even create a theme for your subreddit so it looks different than others. You can also create an AutoModerator that can respond to key words and such in certain ways or perform other basic actions. This is all relatively easy to do, but you can’t exactly change the code within your subreddit to add new features or change how basic Reddit features work….what you can do is limited by what has been implemented on Reddit.
Because is faster just to copy a bunch of code and put your name on it.
Just kidding, but 95% of coding is already done in most cases and the hardest part is what you’re working on. For those parts it’s easier to figure out without the gui adding a slower level. At least in business programming.
It already happened. In **1979**.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/a-spreadsheet-revolution/
> Computer spreadsheet programs have been around since 1979, when Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston created VisiCalc. The breakthrough program turned the Apple II into an electronic ledger, allowing users to enter rows and columns of numbers along with mathematical formulas. When a user changed a number, the formula would automatically recalculate.
> That may seem elementary today, with millions of people using Microsoft Excel and other advanced spreadsheets, but it was a shot in the arm for the nascent personal computer industry and was the impetus for the Apple II being taken seriously as a business tool.
There are many, mostly in graphical design.
Blender has Shader Nodes and Geometry Nodes to program shaders and parametric geometry respectively.
Unreal Engine has Blueprints to program animations, AI, etc…
The main reason is that graph programming is slower to program with, we are much faster at typing on a keyboard than moving a mouse around. And most graph languages are more limited in abstractions. They tend to deal with really simple types.
But I think we could have a graph language fully featured, it’s just that it takes a lot of effort to develop and people will switch to text most of the time.
For PLCs where you have very simple operations and loops, Siemens has Ladder Logic. It works fine for simple stuff, but implementing anything more complicated than
if input 1 then output 1
becomes cumbersome very quickly.
Things like scratch are made to teach you enough to graduate to a more complicated language. Realistically it’s all just methods/functions and the inputs and outputs, but using text instead of pictures.
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