ANNOUNCE: Release of Vital, an interactive visual programming environment for Haskell

[Martin Erwig]

"Marcin 'Qrczak' Kowalczyk" writes:
> W li¶cie z ¶ro, 12-11-2003, godz. 11:06, Graham Klyne pisze:
> 
> > 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.

I think that some visual notations are more readable than text
(but not all). In particular, if you try to teach lambda calculus
or type inference to beginners, visual notations can be extremely
helpful. Consider, for example, VEX [1], which is a visual
notation for lambda calculus, it makes the difference between
bound and free variables very easy to discern and it saves you
from renaming during beta reduction. 


--
Martin



[1] Citrin, W. and Hall, R. and Zorn, B.
    Programming with Visual Expressions
    11th IEEE Symp. on Visual Languages, 294-301, 1995