
What if we could just *draw* the code? - petercooper
http://www.metafilter.com/145129/What-if-we-could-just-draw-the-code
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dalke
That has been a dream since at least Sutherland's 1962 PhD thesis. Many have
tried. It works for a few niches, mostly dealing with data flow. Besides
LabView there's Quartz Composer on the Mac, and Yahoo Pipes, so it's not like
it's an exotic solution. No one has managed to come up with one which is an
effective general purpose language on par with the more text-oriented ones.

~~~
JoeAltmaier
Never mind drawing it. I want to specify it. Not with wads of text, but with
definitions that I could put in a database and granularly track. Declarations,
members, singletons, resources, all of it in a form that tools can understand.

Because source control has negligible semantic knowledge, so does a terrible
job of integrating code. Text files tangle up stuff that should be easily
distinguished by tools but isn't.

~~~
dalke
How is that different than what CASE tools provide? Or an image-based language
like Smalltalk?

