That's "Let things live side-by-side" on Gordon's list at the end of the article. Not breaking the ecosystem, but growing a new one besides it. In the cases you cite, the new one ultimately became the dominant one, and the prior one withered away.

grumpy gripe: iPhone didn't replace land lines! Ubiquity of Smartphones did - I stopped using a land line without ever having to spend insane amounts on an iPhone 🤗

I think "fork" could be replaced better with "evolve in a breaking way", thus distinguishing splitting evolution from breaking evolution and then breaking ecosystems. I mean, a fork shouldn't actually break anything if you're on the fork, it should be backwards compatible down the tree.

The WWW and most major languages (C, C++, Java) did very well keeping things deprecated for years until they withered, or fell into disuse naturally. And Windows/Unix is another example. OS-X is a counter-example

Thanks, love this!

Exactly why for my project, I ignored the form almost altogether. 😆 Maybe you don’t need it at all times.

I actually wonder what would happen if you divided program flow and state into a sort of splitscreen sketch canvas land,

Excel and FileMaker are the best and most useful visual programming systems ever devised.

Excel is a mix of visual and textual. I imagine most effective visual programming systems will be a mix of some kind.

FileMaker is mainly not textual. It can do this because it is for programming in the Relational Model, which is not Turing Complete. Much of what programmers do in TC languages can in fact be represented in the Relational Model. Programming systems that employ a TC language intimately associated with a relational UI and a query language like Datalog would be much more “visual” than most systems in use today.

I honestly dislike excel/spreadsheets, but I get they tend to be their own model. for visual programming in some sub-domains I don’t find them intuitive in terms of how I think.

^Yeah exactly I was thinking this using a sketch canvas to show the code side effects and data

@Karl Toby Rosenberg your drawing looks a lot like pythontutor.com. is that an accurate comparison?

I never really used Python tutor, but I suppose the flow/data split is a point of comparison yes.

I’m into sort of using moving sketches as representations of programs. You probably saw my project floating around.

I disagree with the assertion that "Visual programming hasn't been very successful". I often see examples of visual programming systems that are used and appreciated by many people get discounted as merely domain specific - They aren't "general purpose".

This is a strange (and very common) default expectation of what programming languages should aspire to be. To me, this is a bit like discounting the effectiveness of a chain-saw, because it can't also be used as a screwdriver. We shouldn't judge visual programming languages based on their ability to be a swiss-army-knife like the "general purpose" textual languages we have today.

I'm not terribly interested in attempts at creating a "general purpose" visual programming languages. Designing a tool that can be used in EVERY domain seems hopelessly impossible. Designing a tool that works in a specific domain is going to be a lot more effective and achievable.

Domain-specific makes sense.

I've actually always believed that general purpose is a great and achievable goal, because how else would I, a designer and commoner, build anything I dreamed up? Programming certainly can be, but perhaps shouldn't only be, compared to narrow-focus tools like a chainsaw or pliers. Programming can, and I believe should, be a pen, or money, or clay, a substrate for complex computation, data storage and retrieval, and live malleable stateful display. If textual programming can be comfortably "general purpose", I wonder what makes it become uncomfortable when we consider visual programming?

NB: I would however reference an 💬 #linking-together@2024-12-01 that recasts what we typically mean when we say "general purpose" as in fact domain specific to a particularly narrow range of software development for popular markets

Classic book, deeply influential on me in the mid-00s.