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True Visual Programming
eberta writes "We are still stuck with text programming for the most part. I can think of only a few truly visual programming environments like LabView and none are really mainstream for application development. Being recently unemployed and having ample spare time, I have started a pet project to work on my own version, GIPSpin (Graphical Interface Programming System). With multithreading becoming an increasing issue in software development, I'm wondering why hasn't there been more focus on visual programming. I see so much possibility of making coding easier and handling threading issues semi-automatically by allowing the user to graphically guide the auto-threading AI. Right now it seems the industry is focused on figuring out how to get just small chunks of code auto-threaded either through hardware or compiler technology, with longer term solutions like OpenMP still text based environments."
... check what is/has been out there before. I.e. something called ProGraph has been mentioned on /. a couple of times before.
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Programming By Example
Singularity: a belief in the "God" idea with the "demiurge" relation inverted.
Also for control process applications an interesting thing isg econtent?lp=ru_en&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ipu.rssi.ru %2FLABS%2FLAB49%2Flab49rad.html
http://babelfish.altavista.com/babelfish/trurl_pa
made by Russian Institute or Control Sciences.
Humans think of the world using language, but we also think of the world using visual, spatial, temporal, sensorial... reasoning.
Do ask a real psychologist, she will say that there are different kinds of think. Textual is best suited for abstract, logical reasoning. But associative thinking is often better done visually. In the Programmer's Guide to the Mind you have an interesting classification of all these.
A programming environment should take care of all these kinds of thought, not just support the logic abstractions as they do now. A promising field of research is Programming By Example. This programming style tries to build the final program by using concrete reasoning over samples of data, instead of forcing you to think of the general, abstract procedure.
Singularity: a belief in the "God" idea with the "demiurge" relation inverted.
I don't think you understand what "visual programming" is. None of the example you cite are real visual programming. Visual Basic, et. al., are not true visual programming. They are IDEs to help in building software. Visual programming requires no (or almost no) coding. It is all graphical. One example (I forget the system) involved using blackboxes. The boxes has particular functions (i.e., a signal processor). The boxes had connections for there inputs and outputs, and properties to modify their behavior. You just inserted the boxes you wanted, and connected them controlling the flow of your data. This system reminded me of designing digital logic circuits graphically. It's hard to explain, but it was actually more powerful than my description. There are also systems to generate code from UML.
Anonymous Cowards suck.
The text-based UnrealScript has gone away, to be replaced by a fully-visual language, Kismet.