Oh wow, someone posted my article instead of me, thank you so much.
One thing I didn't really put as much emphasis on as I should have was Smalltalk. That's probably the closest existing solution to what I think "Visual Programming" should be like.
Live editing a program, being able to easily navigate the code in terms of classes and tags instead of files, built-in UI toolkit that lets you create whatever custom visualizations you want, etc. Providing an alternative visual view to the code would be pretty easy too.
What ruins it is that the application you're developing and the platform itself are intimately tied together. It's more of an Operating System than it is an IDE. I don't think that's an actual constraint of the live editor design, it's just how Smalltalk is.
sirwhinesalot•5mo ago
One thing I didn't really put as much emphasis on as I should have was Smalltalk. That's probably the closest existing solution to what I think "Visual Programming" should be like.
Live editing a program, being able to easily navigate the code in terms of classes and tags instead of files, built-in UI toolkit that lets you create whatever custom visualizations you want, etc. Providing an alternative visual view to the code would be pretty easy too.
What ruins it is that the application you're developing and the platform itself are intimately tied together. It's more of an Operating System than it is an IDE. I don't think that's an actual constraint of the live editor design, it's just how Smalltalk is.