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?
replies(4):
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?
https://scriptsofanotherdimension.tumblr.com/
https://blueprintsfromhell.tumblr.com/
and the biggest problem is that a strong bound is screen/display size --- any code chunk which won't fit on a single screen becomes hard to follow (which direction does one scroll next?) and if one does the obvious of declaring modules, then one runs into the wall of text which one was presumably trying to escape from --- just each word is wrapped up in pretty boxes and decorated with lines.
My take on this has always been that we don't have an answer for the question:
>What does an algorithm look like?
That said, I work in this style when I can, often using:
https://www.blockscad3d.com/editor/
to rough out a design, or:
https://github.com/derkork/openscad-graph-editor
for more complex projects --- though that latter usually with a special-purpose library I've been working on: https://github.com/WillAdams/gcodepreview