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I wonder if a computer scientist who understands what's possible & a marketer who can get people excited... Could get an intuitive visual programming language to take off?
I really get the sense that the plain text aesthetic programming has always had turns people away, perhaps another aesthetic could help people realize that they can write their own programs?
@alcinnz as someone who has studied human intelligence and what senses dominate our perception, I strongly believe the right visually-oriented means of writing software has tremendous potential.
Getting it right matters, but look at what has been achieved by non-programmers in even partial attempts (Hypercard, NeXT's UI Builder, even some visual databases might count).
@alcinnz I touched on this a year or so ago while describing a future HPC platform (that I stopped working on because I don't want it to be used to accelerate the LLM nightmare).
@alcinnz there have been many attempts... e.g., Labview, SimuLink, Modelica-language, Squeek... Where is the point? Some of the things we intend to have are easier said than embodied.
@tg9541 The point of my musing: To compete against programming chatbots. Clearly they have appeal!
They reportedly can do many programming jobs quite well, which to me isn't a sign of how good the tech is but how easy the jobs are.
At the same time I can't help but think that there's a simpler solution to these needs.
Yes it's been tried before. But as a computer scientist who knows whats possible... I think it could be explored more ambitiously!
@alcinnz @tg9541 have you come across MIT App Inventor? It's UI is similarly easy as Squeak, it's results though imho are more impressive and more useful because it creates Android and iPhone APKs which run on real phones.
What I like about it is the high abstraction of individual pieces.
@mainec I haven't! I'm looking it up.
@alcinnz as far as I can tell it's most often a lack of imagination that's holding people back. It's not form that's hard to do. It's agency and non-linear thinking (and I don't mean "Agentic AI").
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