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Comment by shadowmint | Hacker News Reader

As a tangentaly related point...

Has any visual programming language ever been successful?

The guys at Epic are really pushing their blueprint system, and a lot of people like it... but its inherantly tied to the engine.

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LabVIEW's graphical language G has been around for a while and is widely used for certain kinds of things. Enough people hate it to consider it successful.

> Enough people hate it to consider it successful.

That is a very insightful quote.

Grasshopper (Rhino) is quite successful for architecture and 3D modeling, but its also tied to the engine. Also see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7274674 for an exhaustive list.

Max/MSP is pretty widely used for music and audio: https://cycling74.com/products/max/

And VVVV http://vvvv.org

> vvvv is a hybrid visual/textual live-programming environment for easy prototyping and development. It is designed to facilitate the handling of large media environments with physical interfaces, real-time motion graphics, audio and video that can interact with many users simultaneously.

Depends what you mean by successful. Most industrial Programmable Logic Controllers (PLCs) can be programmed with a visual language, typically function block diagrams. The blocks are then functions and the lines represent a data value and not necessarily the direction of program flow. Once you want to get beyond basic flow control and into things like loops or state machines, then one would typically make a custom block or entire program using structure text, or some variant of C, etc.

Scratch from MIT.

Ok, you're not going to write an OS in it - but for building games it's amazing. I use it to teach kids coding - some of the work they produce is astounding.

I have to laugh because my son wrote an "OS" in Scratch. It consisted of a splash screen, log-in dialog, a menu to choose one or two little apps to run, and a BSOD.

Ha! Ship it

> The guys at Epic

The people at Epic. Sorry, I know it's annoying, but sexism in computing isn't going to change if we don't pay attention to the language we use.

I don't think 'guys' just refers to males.

Guy Fawkes was male, and there is a feminine equivalent gals, but I think guys is slowing moving over into gender neutral territory (it wasn't when I was a kid, but times change).

It's a cultural thing and varies hugely depending on which country you're in. In my bit of Britain it's quite common for groups of women to refer to themselves as 'guys'.

In the US, it depends heavily on context. "The guys" or "those guys" almost always implies males. Same with any singular usage of the word "guy".

"You guys" is the only usage that can refer to a mixed-gender group. Obviously, that isn't how GP used it.

I agree, both generally and specifically. Supporting your argument is Bell Labs' `sexist`[0], a commmandline tool, part of the Writer's Workbench.

http://man.cat-v.org/unix_WWB/1/sexist

A relevant section from its man page:

    [When given a file as input, sexist prints alternatives] 
    using neutral terms instead of sex-related terms.
    For example "business executive" could easily replace
    the stereotypic "businessman."

To me, "businessman" can be gender neutral just as "guys" can be gender neutral. Today we[1] don't use "businessman" for the same reason that in some years we won't use "guys"; it still gives a biased-towards-men picture of people.

[0] I'm citing Bell Labs because they're prestigious and respected by HN.

[1] Because I'm trying to influence the vox populi, I'm using "we" imprecisely. I hope that those who disagree with me follow my argument even though I'm not speaking for them.

Everyone in VFX industry successfully uses visual programming in production: see programs like Nuke, SideFX Houdini, RealFlow, Fabric Engine, etc.

> but its inherantly tied to the engine

There's no successful (like C in text-based programming) visual programming environment for general-purpose programming at the moment.

Lego still use a graphical language for their Mindstorm kits, iirc.

Which AFAIK is LabVIEW, btw.

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