There are several books on various kinds of visual programming. A lot of this territory was explored in the ARPA-IPTO research community in the 60s. Sketchpad (used the idea of "fusing" visual constraints to the Sketchpad drawings) Online Graphical Procedures (an early graphical dataflow system done by Ivan's brother Bert) GRAIL (flowchart programming only using tablet and recognition) AMBIT-G (before after productions similar to SNOBOL) Lincoln Wand etc.
There was a fair amount investigated and some done at PARC. Some of this can be found in "The Early History of Smalltalk" e.g. Pygmalion (Dave C Smith) Query By Example (also see Zloof) There was a visual Smalltalk syntax Programming by Rehearsal (Gould) Thinglab etc. I'm not sure I would characterize the PARC/EOS CIA "Analyst" as a visual programming system, though it was otherwise very visual At Apple, besides Fabrik and Playground (several versions), there was MacPal and Constructo There was (unimplemented) "the hopping curriculum" which used a visual syntax Tableau was yet another "before-after" visual production language (which eventually became StageCast). All these go back to SNOBOL, and AMBIT (and its graphical manifestation AMBIT-B at Lincoln Labs). At Disney, there was Etoys, and we also collaborated with the Alice folks to adapt DnD tile programming --> this led to Scratch (also on top of Squeak). There are currently two experimental visual programming schemes being tested for Nile in the STEPS project (essentially dataflow). ----- Re visual programming in general, it is hard to find a system over the last 50 years which really has been able to go beyond small examples. GRAIL was implemented in itself, and parts of this worked very well. This project was good sized, but IMO needed to be quite a bit larger to really explore some of the dimensions of possibility. Metafor (Dave Liddle after PARC) was a dataflow data mining system that was really useful, and it could be thought of as visual pipes programming system for really powerful processes. The programming of the workhorse processes was not done visually, but you could group the flows into a box/process. The Brooklyn Union Gas system of the late 80s was extremely impressive, and went the opposite route -- they prototyped in Smalltalk, and displayed the system as diagrams (huge ones printed out every night and displayed on the walls of the big work room). This worked very well, and established a conjecture -- that very large displays can make visual descriptions of complex things work, but small displays hurt for real problems. Etc Cheers, Alan ________________________________ From: John Zabroski <[email protected]> To: Fundamentals of New Computing <[email protected]> Sent: Wed, March 30, 2011 7:09:29 AM Subject: [fonc] visual environments created by present/former VPRI staff I am trying to round up all visual programming kit research written by you folks, so that I can then compile a biography that I can read in one sitting. So far I have: CIA Agent Playground Squeak Skeleton Fabrik What else should I include? Thanks, Z-Bo
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