Thyrd: Forth-Like Reflective Visual Programming Language | Hacker News Reader

Thyrd: Forth-Like Reflective Visual Programming Language

thyrd.org

39 pointsblacksqr8 comments

The link 302 redirects to "http://SRVHOSTNAME". Google cache (no images/diagrams though): http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:G5RqIkY...

Edit: also, copyright date says 2009

Here's an archive from the Wayback Machine (with images): https://web.archive.org/web/20170413043022/http://thyrd.org/...

Strange, must have hit some kind of bandwidth limit.

It seems to me, that all visual programming languages, with the exception of Piet [1] and the ZigZag langs [2], combine the editor and the language. This seems weird to me. Its not like VIM is both a text editor AND a programming language.

[1] http://www.dangermouse.net/esoteric/piet.html [2] http://users.jyu.fi/~antkaij/plinzz.pdf

I guess another example of a visual environment that was separte from a specific language, arguably, would be DRAKON [1]. But DRAKON only supports flow charts, which is lame. Like if VIM only supported imperitive languages...

[1] http://drakon-editor.sourceforge.net/

I don't know why this was considered an improvement on structured programming.

In contrast, dataflow can't be adequately represented in text and so a 2-dimensional visual respresentation is better.

The reason is simply that while textual languages all use the same glyphs (ASCII characters), each visual language uses its own glyphs. Also, the design of visual languages hasn't reached the level of maturity textual languages have reached. When they have, sharing of editors might be possible to some extent.

Until that happens, when you design and develop a new visual language, you also have to design an IDE, which makes it considerably harder than designing a new textual language.

Perhaps VIM isn't also a programming language (I don't know how advanced its scripting language is), but EMACS has a built-in programming language (Lisp), and TECO, its precursor, actually was a programming language.

It's back up now.

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