> I spoke about the dataflow-style languages, the "circuit builders":
> Simulink, Scilab/SciCos, WiT, Khoros, IBM Data Explorer (Now Open
> Source) a diagrammatic layer in MathCad, LabView, etc., (+ the defunct
> Java Studio).
> And, of course, the notorious Visio used by some Haskell gurus
> around, for example by Eric Meijer.
It is worth mentioning Visual Hawk (in Haskell). It also uses
Visio. It seems that PacSoft/OGI do not advertise it yet; I
found this page by a pure chance:
http://www.cse.ogi.edu/PacSoft/projects/VisualHawk/
I have not inspected it yet but the basic Hawk makes much
sense to me and it seems visually tractable. There is a brand new
version of Hawk 2.2 available at:
http://www.cse.ogi.edu/PacSoft/
> If the block present themselves as "objects", not functions on
> the screen, their re-using consists in packaging smaller modules
> in a bigger one, and you will end up with a large hierarchy, which
> might to be difficult to code manually.
> So, I disagree, the 2-dimensional, graphical programming has a nice
> future, although the dataflow languages like Lucid won't ever
> become very popular.
Visual programming was (is?) also a part of the Smalltalk culture.
I do not think that a large hierarchy was there of any problem.
The problem was, in my private opinion, that -- although
it was all advertised as a non-brain package(s) --
the user still had to know something about programming.
All that linking of the components was fine for standard
usage (say, connect a telephone book to Btrieve) but for
non-trivial combination and usage of components one had to
go back to text mode anyway to fill in the gaps. Too simplistic
for programmers, too complex for casual users.
Jan
