Graphical Programming Environments (was: ANNOUNCE: Release of Vit al, an interactive visual programming environment for Haskell)

[Markus.Schnell at infineon.com]

> > I've sometimes thought that a functional language would be 
> the ideal 
> > platform to usher in a purely graphical style of programming;
> 
> I don't understand why so many people talk about graphical 
> programming,
> i.e. putting together functions, arguments, definitins etc. with the
> mouse instead of the keyboard, drawing arrows instead of naming etc.
> 
> No wonder it didn't succeed. It would be much less convenient than
> typing text and less readable too.

That's not necessarily correct. If 'graphical' isn't taken too literally,
you can think of a dialog per function with the possibility to specify
pre and post conditions, tests, comments, etc.
Then it would be possible to view only things your are interested in:
default code, exception handling, interfaces, ... without cluttering the 
screen with 'code of no interest'.

I agree that putting together programs just by click and point would be
tedious. But _viewing_ programs this way could be advantagous.

What do you think?

Best wishes,
Markus