Visual Programming Doesn’t Suck
Grab bag of miscellaneous thoughts on this topic:<p>- Visual computing is pretty heavily used, unreal engine, blender, houdini, etc. All have a very similar node based visual programming system. It seems to work pretty well (better than text) for most of what they use it for. I think because of the ease of jumping in the middle and making small understandable changes.<p>- Many programming languages today have a format that is like &lt;tree of files, each containing&gt; &lt;set of items, each containing&gt; &lt;list of expressions&gt;. It would be nice if that &lt;set of items&gt; step was treated as an unordered set instead of an ordered one, with editors having a better understanding of how to bring up relevant elements of the set onto your screen at the same time. Split pane editors, &quot;peeking&quot; in editors at code definitions, etc. hint at how this should work, but I don&#x27;t feel like they do it as well as possible.<p>- A small amount of &quot;visual augmentation&quot; might benefit most programming languages, I&#x27;m not sure I can explain this better than linking to a few images of what emacs auctex package does to latex <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;lh6.ggpht.com&#x2F;_egN-3IJO0Xg&#x2F;SpIj6AtHOTI&#x2F;AAAAAAAABj8&#x2F;O1aKgTb-Njw&#x2F;preview-latex.png" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;lh6.ggpht.com&#x2F;_egN-3IJO0Xg&#x2F;SpIj6AtHOTI&#x2F;AAAAAAAABj8&#x2F;O1...</a> <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;upload.wikimedia.org&#x2F;wikipedia&#x2F;commons&#x2F;4&#x2F;42&#x2F;Emacs+AucTeX.png" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;upload.wikimedia.org&#x2F;wikipedia&#x2F;commons&#x2F;4&#x2F;42&#x2F;Emacs+...</a>