As an example, rather than a broad assessment of block diagramming languages scalability, in industrial process control they have been used for at least 25 years that I am aware of. To control a power station, you divide the controls into subsystems that mirror the physical plant (and are thus loosely coupled). Within each subsystem, you create further modularization, along specific functional requirements ... modulating control, sequential control, emergency shutdown logic, UI, alarms and logging. Thus you can create a subsystem design with several thousand "blocks" expressed over say 150 pages of "drawings", that is very comprehensible. It scales, if you decompose it properly.
On Mon, Dec 20, 2010 at 12:07 PM, Brian Gilman <[email protected]> wrote: > >> Clearly there are some gaps in the programming models of this new era. >> How can people express themselves in a mathematical notation that >> isn't bound to 19th century keyboard technology? > > I think that the fundamental problem is that keyboards are good for entering > text, and text scales very well. > > Artists and musicians tend to heavily favor visual node based programming, > which is a better fit for mobile platforms. Just drag nodes out, and draw > connections. For non-programmers, being able to see the relationships > between visual blocks of code is much more intuitive than text. The problem > is, that it doesn't scale very well. Once a program reaches even a moderate > level of complexity, the graph of nodes end up looking like a pile of > spaghetti. If you want to rearrange your program, you end up having to > disconnect and reconnect tons of nodes. > > For systems without keyboards, spatial representation of code seems like the > intuitive direction to go, and would work regardless of whether the user is > using a multitouch tablet, or is wearing a pair of AR glasses. Getting that > to scale however, seems like a very difficult problem. > > > _______________________________________________ > fonc mailing list > [email protected] > http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc > _______________________________________________ fonc mailing list [email protected] http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc
