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Visual programming means anyone can be a coder29 August 2012 byDouglas HeavenMagazine issue 2879. Subscribe and saveCoding by tweaking on-screen shapes and drawings could revolutionise computer programming, making it accessible to all
MANY great ideas start out as scribbles on scraps of paper, as thinking visually is an intuitive way to grapple with abstract concepts. Part of the reason is the immediacy - thoughts can be captured and communicated in a sketch and, if wrong, changed or scratched out just as quickly. Not so for computer programmers. A program is a set of instructions for turning input - such as numerical values - into output. The causal chain is one-way. To change the output, you have to trace the chain back to the relevant instructions and change what they do with the input. This can make hunting down errors in the program or simply experimenting with different outputs an unintuitive process of jumping back-and-forth. Artist and programmer Toby Schachman thinks we can do better. As part of his thesis project for the Interactive Telecommunications Program at New York University, he developed an experimental programming interface called Recursive Drawing, in which programmers can incrementally build up complex fractal-like structures. The design lets them manipulate the underlying source code by simply dragging parts of the patterns around. "When people describe algorithms they'll give a spatial analogy almost all the time," says Schachman. Though still in its early stages, the ideas behind the interface could change the way programming is done. Think of interacting with Photoshop. "The form that you're working in resembles the thing that you're creating," says Schachman - there is no need to worry about changing the underlying code. His prototype works in much the same way. He will present it at the Splash programming conference in Tucson, Arizona, in October. He's not alone in wanting to simplify the coding process. Bret Victor, who has designed user interfaces for Apple, is another developer who wants to open up programming to a wider community. "To write code you essentially have to play computer. You have to simulate in your head what each line of code would do," he said in a talk last year at the Canadian University Software Engineering Conference. "So much of creation is about discovery and you can't discover anything if you can't see what you're doing." Schachman's approach is a good start, agrees Peter van Roy, a computer scientist at the Catholic University of Louvain (UCL) in Belgium and developer of FractaSketch, a graphical design tool based on fractals that has been used in the fashion industry. "Text-based programming is still the best way to give precise instructions to a computer," he says. But there's a big gap between writing the text and seeing what the running program does. "Bringing in graphical ideas like Schachman does can definitely reduce this gap," he adds Sara Jones at City University in London, who is researching creative techniques for software development, says Recursive Drawing is part of a trend that will help to democratise programming. "It opens up the process of programming to a broader community of people, including artists, architects and designers, for whom the unnecessary translation of ideas into text may constitute a frustrating and unwelcome block to the flow of creative ideas," she says.
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Just Another Syntax?Wed Aug 29 12:29:04 BST 2012 by Alexandre VinetProgramming is complex because the logic required to run a computer is complex, not because the syntax is too hard to understand. It takes some adjustments to learn a new syntax, but the concept of computer programming is what you really need to learn. Once the actual programming aspect has been successfully understood, syntax is just a minor obstacle. Symbols and images and drawings will just be another syntax.
I fear making it simpler and more accessible would allow people to be able to code some programs without being able to fully understand the actual logic required, thus making very inefficient, possibly insecure code. A bit like the way Microsoft FrontPage made creating websites a lot more accessible and easy for non web-savvies, but ended up creating pages with bloated, unmanageable code that was very difficult to maintain and expand on.
It would be, however, extremely interesting to see a combination of text based programming with a visual cue on the side giving you an idea of where your code is going. Current compilers and interpreters are usually very good at letting you know where your code will break your application because of a syntax mistake, but not very good at guessing if your application is going to do what you want it to do. I would gladly welcome a change to breakpoints.
It has already been tried numerous times. Java-beans for example. MS Access query builder is one of the few usable ones I have tried, but doesn't make the logic any simpler
login and replyreport this commentJust Another Syntax?Wed Aug 29 15:09:01 BST 2012 by DanielI've done designing of domain specific computer languages, and yes, for certain limited applications one may develop some language to express visually. The most famous of this approach has been the "programming by example", where you prototype how things will look like. A different approach may try to visualize an aspect of what happens in a computer, and build a language to manipulate that visual representation, like an editor. The "programmer" can then manipulate visually the representation, simulating it to check whether it delivers the final result, and when ready, the recorder interaction generates all necessary underlying machine instructions.
I am highly sceptical however, that anyone will make accessible to untrained people any general purpose programming technology.
In short:
- domain specific small application areas - yes
- general purpose programming - very unlikely
I've been programming for a long time and I regularly see products which are supposed to let the general public produce applications by manipulating graphics on the screen. But if you look around, you'll find that nobody is actually using those applications.
So here's my proposal: Let the people working on this visual program paradigm elaborate it until they can produce an application which schedules garbage-truck drivers to work various shifts depending on the rules in their union contract. Preferably with a real union contract. Then they will have something worth considering.
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