[Haskell-cafe] Re: Visual Programming Languages

[Stijn De Saeger]

> This was odd...
> 
> Some cherry-picked quotes from the manifesto:
>   http://alarmingdevelopment.org/index.php?p=5
> 
>  - Visual languages are not the solution: ... common idea is to replace AST
> structures with some form of graphical diagram. ...
> 
>  - Programming is not Mathematics
> 
>  - Change is natural: There has been much effort expended to remove the
> concept of mutable state from programming, to be replaced by immutable
> values as in mathematics. This is entirely misguided. ... Monads are a
> reductio ad absurdum.  [ Heresy! :-) ]
> 
>  - Control flow considered harmful:  ... The primary reason for this is to
> permit side-effects to be ordered by the programmer. ... [ This appears to
> contradict the criticism of monads. ]
> 
> But then the demo shows us how to define a Factorial function using an
> editor that (AFAICT) is simply operating on AST structures, in a
> tree-oriented layout. I must be missing something.
> 
> Alistair.

Yes, it is a bit of a twist. I came across this thing a couple of days
ago on the LtU blog, and somehow thought it relevant to the issue of
visual programming. I'm curious why the author himself doesn't
consider this to be a visual programming language, considering that
the language only allows you to program by copying and pasting.

stijn.