Excel is not really visual programming though. It's got visual presentation, but all the programming still happens in text and in the worst code editor there is. The visual programming parts that do exist are very limited/specialised.
Programming is not in text. Yes, formulas have textual representations but can be graphically defined if you are not an advanced user (e.g. click to select parameters including ranges). Also, other than formulas, there are e.g. iteration semantics in copying a formula down, applying it to a column on a table etc. There is even limited recursion. The model breaks down in some areas, e.g. using silver is not as well integrated.
Yeah in theory you can, but it's almost write-only. You can't easily edit the formulas that way. Even complete beginners I've observed preferred the writing to dealing with the other dropdown input.
It's visual at the top layer (rows, columns) but soon gets very awkward when you're stuffing program statements into small boxes.
There was a big explosion of weird and wonderful visual programming languages in the 1980s, such as CASE tools, loads of commercial 8 bit game-making systems, HP's early 80s workstations, and dozens of BASIC variants (which weren't very visual, but let you draw things with extreme ease). I wonder if there are any under-explored ideas there.
100%. Hundreds of millions of people have been successfully using this visual programming environment with little to no CS education to solve real business problems for decades. What’s most important — the “visual” part is what actually allows non-programmers to build the intuition and write correct programs, it’s a core feature that reinforces the success, not a gimmicky bolt-on.
Also important to reflect on this, I think: it’s a dynamic functional programming language with annoyingly weak and limited types, with inconsistent string parsing, and the most obtuse and uninformative error messages, and it still works wonderfully.
DonHopkins on April 2, 2021 | parent | context | favorite | on: Spreadsheet is a software development paradigm
Spreadsheet certainly are visual programming languages: by any measure, by far one of the most common most widely used types of visual programming languages in the world.
Taxonomies of Visual Programming (1990) [pdf] (cmu.edu)
>DonHopkins on July 13, 2019 | on: I was wrong about spreadsheets (2017)
>Google sheets (and other google docs) can be programmed in "serverless" JavaScript that runs in the cloud somewhere. It's hellishly slow making sheets API calls, though. Feels like some kind of remote procedure call. (Slower than driving Excel via OLE Automation even, and that's saying something!) Then it times out on a wall clock (not cpu time) limit, and breaks if you take too long.
>A CS grad student friend of mine was in a programming language class, and the instructor was lecturing about visual programming languages, and claimed that there weren't any widely used visual programming languages. (This was in the late 80's, but some people are still under the same impression.)
>He raised his hand and pointed out that spreadsheets qualified as visual programming languages, and were pretty darn common.
>They're quite visual and popular because of their 2D spatial nature, relative and absolute 2D addressing modes, declarative functions and constraints, visual presentation of live directly manipulatable data, fonts, text attributes, background and foreground colors, lines, patterns, etc. Some even support procedural scripting languages whose statements are written in columns of cells.
>Maybe "real programmers" would have accepted spreadsheets more readily had Lotus named their product "Lotus 012"? (But then normal people would have hated it!)
Excerpt from "Taxonomies of Visual Programming and Program Visualization", by Brad A Myers, 1990/3/1, Journal of Visual Languages & Computing, Volume 1, Issue 1, pages 97-123:
Spreadsheets, such as those in VisiCalc or Lotus 1-2-3, were designed to help nonprogrammers manage finances. Spreadsheets incorporate programming features and can be made to do general purpose calculations [71] and therefore qualify as a very-high level Visual Programming Language. Some of the reasons that spreadsheets are so popular are (from [43] and [1]):
1. the graphics on the screen use familiar, concrete, and visible representation which directly maps to the user's natural model of the data,
2. they are nonmodal and interpretive and therefore provide immediate feedback,
3. they supply aggregate and high-level operations,
4. they avoid the notion of variables (all data is visible),
5. the inner world of computation is suppressed,
6. each cell typically has a single value throughout the computation,
7. they are nondeclarative and typeless,
8. consistency is automatically maintained, and
9. the order of evaluation (flow of control) is entirely derived from the declared cell dependencies.
The first point differentiates spreadsheets from many other Visual Programming Languages including flowcharts which are graphical representations derived from textual (linear) languages. With spreadsheets, the original representation in graphical and there is no natural textual language.
Action Graphics [41] uses ideas from spreadsheets to try to make it easier to program graphical animations. The 'Forms' system [43] uses a more conventional spreadsheet format, but adds sub-sheets (to provide procedural abstraction) which can have an unbounded size (to handle arbitrary parameters).
A different style of system is SIL-ICON [49], which allows the user to construct 'iconic sentences' consisting of graphics arranged in a meaningful two-dimensional fashion, as shown in Figure 5. The SIL-ICON interpreter then parses the picture to determine what it means. The interpreter itself is generated from a description of the legal pictures, in the same way that conventional compilers can be generated from BNF descriptions of the grammar.
10. Conclusions
Visual Programming and Program Visualization are interesting areas that show promise for improving the programming process, especially for non-programmers, but more work needs to be done. The success of spreadsheets demonstrates that if we find the appropriate paradigms, graphical techniques can revolutionize the way people interact with computers.
Taxonomies of Visual Programming (1990) [pdf] (cmu.edu)
107 points by mr_tyzik on Feb 7, 2021 | hide | past | favorite | 49 comments
BradAMyers on Feb 7, 2021 | next [–]
Thanks for your interest in my old article! That version is a draft update of this article: Brad A. Myers. "Visual Programming, Programming by Example, and Program Visualization; A Taxonomy," Proceedings SIGCHI '86: Human Factors in Computing Systems. Boston, MA. April 13-17, 1986. pp. 59-66.
Excel is not really visual programming though. It's got visual presentation, but all the programming still happens in text and in the worst code editor there is. The visual programming parts that do exist are very limited/specialised.
Programming is not in text. Yes, formulas have textual representations but can be graphically defined if you are not an advanced user (e.g. click to select parameters including ranges). Also, other than formulas, there are e.g. iteration semantics in copying a formula down, applying it to a column on a table etc. There is even limited recursion. The model breaks down in some areas, e.g. using silver is not as well integrated.
Yeah in theory you can, but it's almost write-only. You can't easily edit the formulas that way. Even complete beginners I've observed preferred the writing to dealing with the other dropdown input.
It's visual at the top layer (rows, columns) but soon gets very awkward when you're stuffing program statements into small boxes.
There was a big explosion of weird and wonderful visual programming languages in the 1980s, such as CASE tools, loads of commercial 8 bit game-making systems, HP's early 80s workstations, and dozens of BASIC variants (which weren't very visual, but let you draw things with extreme ease). I wonder if there are any under-explored ideas there.
100%. Hundreds of millions of people have been successfully using this visual programming environment with little to no CS education to solve real business problems for decades. What’s most important — the “visual” part is what actually allows non-programmers to build the intuition and write correct programs, it’s a core feature that reinforces the success, not a gimmicky bolt-on.
Also important to reflect on this, I think: it’s a dynamic functional programming language with annoyingly weak and limited types, with inconsistent string parsing, and the most obtuse and uninformative error messages, and it still works wonderfully.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26668885
DonHopkins on April 2, 2021 | parent | context | favorite | on: Spreadsheet is a software development paradigm
Spreadsheet certainly are visual programming languages: by any measure, by far one of the most common most widely used types of visual programming languages in the world.
Taxonomies of Visual Programming (1990) [pdf] (cmu.edu)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26057530
https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~bam/papers/VLtax2-jvlc-1990.pdf
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26061576
Brad Myers' paper answers the age-old argument about whether or not spreadsheets are visual programming languages!
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20425821
>DonHopkins on July 13, 2019 | on: I was wrong about spreadsheets (2017)
>Google sheets (and other google docs) can be programmed in "serverless" JavaScript that runs in the cloud somewhere. It's hellishly slow making sheets API calls, though. Feels like some kind of remote procedure call. (Slower than driving Excel via OLE Automation even, and that's saying something!) Then it times out on a wall clock (not cpu time) limit, and breaks if you take too long.
>A CS grad student friend of mine was in a programming language class, and the instructor was lecturing about visual programming languages, and claimed that there weren't any widely used visual programming languages. (This was in the late 80's, but some people are still under the same impression.)
>He raised his hand and pointed out that spreadsheets qualified as visual programming languages, and were pretty darn common.
>They're quite visual and popular because of their 2D spatial nature, relative and absolute 2D addressing modes, declarative functions and constraints, visual presentation of live directly manipulatable data, fonts, text attributes, background and foreground colors, lines, patterns, etc. Some even support procedural scripting languages whose statements are written in columns of cells.
>Maybe "real programmers" would have accepted spreadsheets more readily had Lotus named their product "Lotus 012"? (But then normal people would have hated it!)
I Was Wrong About Spreadsheets And I'm Sorry:
https://www.reifyworks.com/writing/2017-01-25-i-was-wrong-ab...
HN Discussion:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20417967
Excerpt from "Taxonomies of Visual Programming and Program Visualization", by Brad A Myers, 1990/3/1, Journal of Visual Languages & Computing, Volume 1, Issue 1, pages 97-123:
Spreadsheets, such as those in VisiCalc or Lotus 1-2-3, were designed to help nonprogrammers manage finances. Spreadsheets incorporate programming features and can be made to do general purpose calculations [71] and therefore qualify as a very-high level Visual Programming Language. Some of the reasons that spreadsheets are so popular are (from [43] and [1]):
1. the graphics on the screen use familiar, concrete, and visible representation which directly maps to the user's natural model of the data,
2. they are nonmodal and interpretive and therefore provide immediate feedback,
3. they supply aggregate and high-level operations,
4. they avoid the notion of variables (all data is visible),
5. the inner world of computation is suppressed,
6. each cell typically has a single value throughout the computation,
7. they are nondeclarative and typeless,
8. consistency is automatically maintained, and
9. the order of evaluation (flow of control) is entirely derived from the declared cell dependencies.
The first point differentiates spreadsheets from many other Visual Programming Languages including flowcharts which are graphical representations derived from textual (linear) languages. With spreadsheets, the original representation in graphical and there is no natural textual language.
Action Graphics [41] uses ideas from spreadsheets to try to make it easier to program graphical animations. The 'Forms' system [43] uses a more conventional spreadsheet format, but adds sub-sheets (to provide procedural abstraction) which can have an unbounded size (to handle arbitrary parameters).
A different style of system is SIL-ICON [49], which allows the user to construct 'iconic sentences' consisting of graphics arranged in a meaningful two-dimensional fashion, as shown in Figure 5. The SIL-ICON interpreter then parses the picture to determine what it means. The interpreter itself is generated from a description of the legal pictures, in the same way that conventional compilers can be generated from BNF descriptions of the grammar.
10. Conclusions
Visual Programming and Program Visualization are interesting areas that show promise for improving the programming process, especially for non-programmers, but more work needs to be done. The success of spreadsheets demonstrates that if we find the appropriate paradigms, graphical techniques can revolutionize the way people interact with computers.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26057530
Taxonomies of Visual Programming (1990) [pdf] (cmu.edu) 107 points by mr_tyzik on Feb 7, 2021 | hide | past | favorite | 49 comments
BradAMyers on Feb 7, 2021 | next [–]
Thanks for your interest in my old article! That version is a draft update of this article: Brad A. Myers. "Visual Programming, Programming by Example, and Program Visualization; A Taxonomy," Proceedings SIGCHI '86: Human Factors in Computing Systems. Boston, MA. April 13-17, 1986. pp. 59-66.
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~bam/papers/chi86vltax.pdf
Also, the next one is relational tables.
Tables are super visual (even in forms like CSV).