I've been interested in this for years.
Are there other similar projects that you're familiar with? Perhaps targeting other languages?
What are the major problems with this approach to programming? Are large programs hard to work with?
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Erlang-RED has been my project for the last couple of months and I would love to get some feedback from the HN community.
The idea is to take advantage of Erlangs message passing and low overhead processes to have true concurrency in Node-RED flows. Plus also to bring low-code visual flow-based programming to Erlang.
Are there other similar projects that you're familiar with? Perhaps targeting other languages?
What are the major problems with this approach to programming? Are large programs hard to work with?
Main problems with visual flow based programming is the tooling: there aren't any good tools for doing visual comparison nor visual version control. Things like GitHub aren't able to render flow code as seen in the editor.
For Node-RED that means that the Json that defines a flow can be compared but that soon becomes meaningless because semantic changes get mixed with visual changes, i.e., that the x,y coordinates of a node have changed - is meaningless for the logic of the code.
This means that code sharing and collaborative development is difficult purely visually but only because tooling is missing. Compared to textual programming before things like SourceForge or Git and we had the same issues as we do with visual coding now.
Node-RED has a bunch of features to make large programs maintainable. Things like link nodes that allow jumping between flows also allow code reuse. There also subflows which encapsulate repeated code and can be referenced from anywhere.
That's also why I chose Node-RED for this because it seems to be the most mature and best maintained low-code visual flow-based programming tool. There are others such as n8n (which seems to be the other biggie) but they lack the generalness of Node-RED. I can create web sites with Node-RED while and the same time controlling my LEDs via Raspberry installation. Node-RED is extremely flexible.
The people who use Node-RED aren't the same that can develop those kinds of solutions. Those that can port Node-RED to Python don't need to use a low-code visual environment.
It isn't like Emacs users: Emacs user can also extend Emacs and probably even fix a bug in the lisp code of Emacs. Node-RED users use Node-RED becausae they don't want to program nor learn to program nor understand how Node-RED works.
Hence my attempt to take the whole concept and bring to a collection of developers who might appreciate visual FBP but who could also code extensions to the editor.
My goal is to bring visual FBP to a broader audience, be that developers or non-developers, be that Erlang coders or NodeJS coders, no matter - the ideas of FBP are important to understand, especially in our data-driven digital world.