Big Programming Week

I now completed my study of visual programming languages, from the other end.

The end where everything my users stitch visually, must be powerful and clean and beautiful.

The biggest lesson here, is that you cant make a programming language visual.

You can’t just add pretty boxes with ports, and start connecting everything with cables.

You have to create commands, that can be represented well.

Technically a simple function has argument ports, and an output port, but little things make a mess of wires.

Little bits of functionality, are in fact not compatible with visual programming.

The bits that work are: narrate this poem, convert this audio to lip-sync and apply this photo over it.

These are such large chunks of functionality, that you have to keep them inside virtual computers to make them portable.

This right here, is where you drag wires, between file and converter, generated audio, and video, and some picture-in-picture creature.

Conversely if you start stitching large things, with non-visual little programs.

You will not remember how they work, because after a while, you lose track of all the wiring.

And you bet, there will be multiple little programs that script the big.

And then start wishing, this was a visual program, and sometimes you even wish you could move a wire or two.

These commands, is something you instruct your AI to create, you can make anything into a command, but you may need to think about it.

And instead of saying, for every customer, of for every line in this file, you make a program that just takes the file and handles it internally.

As a visual programmer you have a duty, to keep your visual programming language visual.

My next challenge, is bringing visual programming to the web browser as a plugin.

I tried twice already, but in the pre-coding agent era, now with help of powerful AI, an AI generated action library.

And web pages themselves exposing commands or tools for AI use, a good programming language will go a long way.

Hopefully, I will finally be able to sort my programming bookmarks.