Visual Programming (S04 E01)

The Technium

'Visual Programming' refers a style of programming that allows the user to specify a programs in a two-(or more)-dimensional fashion. Visual programming environments represent the data, control flow, or program state in a graphical way, allowing them to be directly manipulated. It has been a hot area of research from the very beginning of personal computing, to today.

This week we will cover a few major visual programming environments, why visual programming has remained compelling over the decades, and whether there is untapped potential for VP today.

Chapters:

[00:00:00] Intros

[00:03:50] What is Visual Programming?

[00:05:42] Origins

[00:14:34] Block-based Visual Programming

[00:20:26] Wire and Dataflow-based Visual Programming

[00:31:51] An Umbrella Term

[00:36:31] Conceptual History

[00:48:23] The Duality of Direct Manipulation

[00:58:40] Direct Manipulation of Running State

[01:11:25] Programming by Example

[01:21:17] Fill in the Details for Me

[01:28:49] Strengths of Visual Programming

[01:43:36] Leveraging the Visual Cortex

[01:50:58] Second Order Effects

Links/Resources:

• SketchPad demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Cq8S3jzJiQ
• Pygmilion
  • Paper: http://worrydream.com/refs/Smith%20-%20Pygmalion.pdf
  • Demo:: https://youtu.be/xNW8wUpbqQM?t=319
• Grail
  • Demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Cq8S3jzJiQ
• Hypercard
  • Demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Cq8S3jzJiQ
• Viewpoint https://scottkim.com/2020/06/07/viewpoint/
• Scratch
  • https://www.bryanbraun.com/2022/07/16/scratch-is-a-big-deal/
• Labview (imperative control flow): https://www.ni.com/en-us/shop/labview.html
• Unreal Engine Blueprint (functional)
  • https://docs.unrealengine.com/5.0/en-US/blueprints-visual-scripting-in-unreal-engine/
  • https://blueprintsfromhell.tumblr.com/
• Max/MSP for musicians
  • https://cycling74.com/products/max
• Others
  • https://cables.gl/
  • https://nodes.io/
    
    

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The Technium is a weekly podcast discussing the edge of technology and what we can build with it. Each week, Sri and Wil introduce a big idea in the future of computing and extrapolate the effect it will have on the world.

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