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JavaScript Gets Visual With Waterbear

Posted by timothy on from the click-and-drag-and-two-and-three dept.

mikejuk writes "Waterbear, a new 'Scratch-like' visual programming language, made its debut at a JavaScript conference this week. Basically you can put together a JavaScript program by putting blocks together and entering some parameters. The output is JavaScript that you can use in other web pages. The Waterbear system runs in a browser, it's HTML5 based, and needs no installation. You can't help but think that this is the way all programming will be done in the future."

2 of 220 comments (clear)

  1. The dream that will not die by not-my-real-name · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Visual programming is a dream that will not die. Those of us who've been around for a while remember flowcharts. Everybody was suppose to use flowcharts. I think that there were even programs that would turn flowcharts into code (and vice versa). How many people do you know who do much flowcharting now? Years ago, Fred Brooks addressed this issue and pointed out that software is very difficult to visualize.

    The latest iteration of the idea is "Model Driven Architecture" which is suppose to turn UML (or BPMN) diagrams for a system into code. There are some people who claim some success with this is limited areas. The truth is somewhere between the unbridled optimism and luddite pessimism.

    The thing is that programming is hard work and while these tools are helpful, you still need to think about programming. There is no magic bullet (to quote Brooks again).

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  2. Re:...in the future by Homburg · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I've heard this before about visual languages, in a couple of different field, but it never pans out.

    We could see these visual programming systems as versions of the "visual languages" that preceded full writing systems. Very early scripts used ideograms, symbols directly representing ideas. These were replaced fairly early by more abstract systems, where the symbols represented words or sounds, which allow for much more sophisticated communication. These visual programming systems seem to want to take us back about 6000 years.