I enjoyed reading this. I knew of quartz composer but I never did anything with it.<p>I love visual tools and I think they are underutilized today. I cut my teeth in ~2005 with Houdini[0] and Fusion[1] which are both heavily graph / node based (and procedural).<p>Most recently I have been rekindling my love for visual programming and flow based programming and plan to spend some time in January and February doing more research around flow based programming for infrastructure management.<p>I plan to get this sort of info published on my website which I have neglected for half a decade or more but if you are interested in visual programming you might enjoy checking these out:<p>Unit from Samuel Timbó:<p><a href="https://github.com/samuelmtimbo/unit">https://github.com/samuelmtimbo/unit</a><p><a href="https://ioun.it/" rel="nofollow">https://ioun.it/</a><p>A video of me exploring what I figured out about it (while also learning to stream) <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vwknTfGVDq8">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vwknTfGVDq8</a><p>Behave-Graph from Ben Houston:<p><a href="https://github.com/bhouston/behave-graph">https://github.com/bhouston/behave-graph</a><p>And the products I learned so long ago<p>[0] Houdini <a href="https://www.sidefx.com/products/houdini/" rel="nofollow">https://www.sidefx.com/products/houdini/</a><p>[1] Fusion <a href="https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/products/fusion" rel="nofollow">https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/products/fusion</a>
Any reason why we don’t have a visual tool that builds an AST?<p>I know that there have been a lot of insultingly bad visual tools. And I totally get why we often use text. And most of us are comfortable in our own IDE or what not setups.<p>But if you honestly take a step back, we’re trying to mimic a more graphical approach in text- curly braces, syntax highlighting, identation, etc.<p>I think the world is missing out on entire categories of folks who could be programming while we debate curly braces vs indentation and whether semi-colons are a good thing or not.<p>In the near future, will they look back and laugh?
I remember being blown away the first time I saw the visual programming tool that came with Silicon Graphics workstations.<p>Visual programming works great as long as you restrict it to a particular domain (e.g. data processing, visualization, audio processing etc).
I also came at some of this stuff from an early background in electronic music and modular synthesis (which is all about making the connections between functional blocks visual/visceral).<p>I've used Max/MSP and Grasshopper. I find them really great for building up interactive tools which have a bunch of inputs/controls.<p>The one down side of these tools is that they can turn into visual spaghetti code which is hard to trace.<p>I strongly recommend the last two links in the article for their visual catalogs of visual programming environments.
Surprised nobody's mentioned LabView yet! Anybody have experience/opinions using this? Their versioning is one of the worst I've ever seen, but they have a impressively comprehensive ecosystem of industrial test equipment.<p><a href="https://www.ni.com/en-us/shop/labview.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.ni.com/en-us/shop/labview.html</a>
I prototyped several user OSX user interface animations using Quartz Composer during my time at Apple. It was a great tool for rapid iterations. We would demo to Steve, get feedback and quickly make changes. Before Quartz Composer, Bas Ording would create prototypes using Macromedia Director. He had a nice collection of Lingo routines for various types of animations.
Related reading some of you may enjoy: My Heart Feeds a Series of Tubes: <a href="https://medium.com/message/my-heart-feeds-a-series-of-tubes-de78858ddfc8" rel="nofollow">https://medium.com/message/my-heart-feeds-a-series-of-tubes-...</a> A nostalgic love letter to Yahoo Pipes