Hacker News Reader

Comment by BradAMyers | Hacker News Reader

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

View on HN

By the way, something I always meant to ask you, Brad:

How does "C32" fit into your acronym theme of gemstones and rocks? Is it a teeny tiny 4x4x2 carbon atom block of diamond? How many carats would that be?

>Brad Myers wrote several articles in that book about his work on PERIDOT and GARNET, and he also developed C32:

>C32: CMU's Clever and Compelling Contribution to Computer Science in CommonLisp which is Customizable and Characterized by a Complete Coverage of Code and Contains a Cornucopia of Creative Constructs, because it Can Create Complex, Correct Constraints that are Constructed Clearly and Concretely, and Communicated using Columns of Cells, that are Constantly Calculated so they Change Continuously, and Cancel Confusion

>Spreadsheet-like system that allows constraints on objects to be specified by demonstration. Intelligent cut and paste. Implemented using Garnet.

http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~bam/acronyms.html

That's a great acronym, but IMHO the acronym I came up with for the first iteration of FBP was also pretty good: DOORMAT (Data-Oriented Organization Running Multiple Asynchronous Tasks)! However, it was deemed to be lacking in gravitas!

C32 doesn't follow the general convention of my group of naming after gemstones or kinds of minerals, but I think it is fun. Very few of our systems strive for gravitas!

My transparently paned contribution of "GLASS" for "Graphical Layer And Server Simplifier" was technically a mineral, but not a very precious one. But it was great for making windows! Too bad it kept shattering because ugly X11 was on one side of it and beautiful Lisp was on the other. But at least you can cut "GLASS" to make fake gemstones of "PASTE".

https://www.gemselect.com/english/other-info/paste-gems.php

Did you ever write any projects in Ruby? ;)

Have you been made aware of any interesting later developments? How do you view the current landscape, eg. minecraft, scratch, blockly, kodu, etc.?

I do try to follow the field. There are lots of modern VPs and some commercial successes. The key "large-scale" VPs are LabView from National Instruments, and OutSystems. There are a lot of what nowadays are called "No Code" or "Low Code" environments, that are mostly VPs as well - see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No-code_development_platform

LabView seems constrained to the electronics/signals world. For that sort focus-area interface, Blender has a similar 'flow' graph based programming mechanism for its filters. I think this is common in digital audio authoring apps too. I was not aware of OutSystems, it seems like it's basically VB for webapps.

Hey Brad! Can you believe it's been 29 years since we worked together when I was visiting the Garnet group at CMU? Thank you for that wonderful opportunity, I really learned a lot from it. It's such a rare treat to actually be paid to write Lisp code!

About four years ago I mentioned Garnet on HN and linked to an article I wrote about it called "Constraints and Prototypes in Garnet and Laszlo", and your "All the Widgets" video, here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11232154

>Yay Garnet! ;) I worked on Garnet with Brad Myers at CMU, on the PostScript printing driver. Brad is really into mineral acronyms, and I came up with an acronym he liked: "GLASS: Graphical Layer And Server Simplifier".

Constraints and Prototypes in Garnet and Laszlo (updated link)

https://web.archive.org/web/20070422104545/http://www.donhop...

All the Widgets (Fixed v2) - 1990

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9qtd8Hc90Hw

Thank you for inviting me to give a guest lecture to your UI class about pie menus:

https://scs.hosted.panopto.com/Panopto/Pages/Viewer.aspx?id=...

Just yesterday I cited Richard Potter's "Just-in-Time Programming" paper in "Watch What I Do: Programming by Demonstration" that you co-edited, as being relevant to playing Factorio!

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26053703

>Playing Factorio requires starting out by performing a few tasks by hand, then thinking about how to incrementally automate factories with trains, drones, combinator circuits, and blueprints, with high level modular repeatable patterns. And estimating where the break-even point is between completing a few tasks by hand, and spending the time to automate more common tasks.

>That evokes an article that Richard Potter wrote about "Just-in-Time Programming" in Alan Cypher's classic book (which is now online for free), "Watch What I Do: Programming by Demonstration", about when "the user attempts to write a program for a task that is already in progress":

http://acypher.com/wwid

>Watch What I Do: Programming by Demonstration. Edited by Allen Cypher. Co-edited by Daniel C. Halbert, David Kurlander, Henry Lieberman, David Maulsby, Brad A. Myers, and Alan Turransky. 1993. The MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, London, England.

http://acypher.com/wwid/Chapters/27JITP.html

>Chapter 27: Just-in-Time Programming. Richard Potter.

[...]

I was lucky to have the pleasure of working with Richard Potter at Ben Shneiderman's Human Computer Interaction Lab at the University of Maryland, while he was developing an early version of Triggers, which he also wrote about in that book:

http://acypher.com/wwid/Chapters/17Triggers.html

Morgan Dixon and James Fogarty, who were working with James Landay at the University of Washington, also did some wonderful work along those lines on Prefab, which I've written about here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11520967

Also just yesterday, I enjoyed watching Dan Ingalls' talk on "Pronto: Toward a Live Designer's Notebook", in which he demonstrated how he's been exploring Programming by Demonstration in Lively!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=if72CFsF_SY&ab_channel=YOW%2...

Also, here are some other great papers about visual programming I've linked to before on HN, in which I mentioned your brilliant acronym C32:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18496880

I really enjoyed this paper “A Taxonomy of Simulation Software: A work in progress” from Learning Technology Review by Kurt Schmucker at Apple. It covered many of my favorite systems.

http://donhopkins.com/home/documents/taxonomy.pdf

It reminds me of the much more modern an comprehensive "Gadget Background Survey" that Chaim Gingold did at HARC, which includes Alan Kay's favorites, Rockey’s Boots and Robot Odyssey, and Chaim's amazing SimCity Reverse Diagrams and lots of great stuff I’d never seen before:

http://chaim.io/download/Gingold%20(2017)%20Gadget%20(1)%20S...

I've also been greatly inspired by the systems described in the classic books “Visual Programming” by Nan C Shu, and “Watch What I Do: Programming by Demonstration” edited by Alan Cypher.

https://archive.org/details/visualprogrammin00shu_2pf

https://archive.org/details/watchwhatido00alle

Brad Myers wrote several articles in that book about his work on PERIDOT and GARNET, and he also developed C32:

C32: CMU's Clever and Compelling Contribution to Computer Science in CommonLisp which is Customizable and Characterized by a Complete Coverage of Code and Contains a Cornucopia of Creative Constructs, because it Can Create Complex, Correct Constraints that are Constructed Clearly and Concretely, and Communicated using Columns of Cells, that are Constantly Calculated so they Change Continuously, and Cancel Confusion

http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~bam/acronyms.html

Also, here's an interesting paper about Fabrik:

https://donhopkins.com/home/Fabrik%20PE%20paper.pdf

Danny Ingalls, one of the developers of Fabrik at Apple, explains:

"Probably the biggest difference between Fabrik and other wiring languages was that it obeyed modular time. There were no loops, only blocks in which time was instant, although a block might ’tick’ many times in its enclosing context. This meant that it was real data flow and could be compiled to normal languages like Smalltalk (and Pascal for Apple at the time). Although it also behaved bidirectionally (e.g. temp converter), a bidirectional diagram was really only a shorthand for two diagrams with different sources (this extended to multidirectionality as well)"

Great list, thanks!

One of my favourite quotes: "Constraints are like structured programming for variables". https://web.archive.org/web/20070422104545/http://www.donhop...

Are you still interested in visual programming? If yes, I would appreciate having a chat (I develop a visual programming tool).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com