Marten
I saw an implementation of Prograph called Marten.I shouldn't really plug an alternative VPL, but it looks pretty nice. Having a nice look and feel is so important, and Macs do look very nice indeed.
Prograph differs from Visula mainly in its notation, I think Visula's notation is much better structurally, but dataflow is nice too. Prograph's run-time libraries are much more developed than Visula's. Makes me realise that I should get my act together and develop some more libraries.
Personally I see no reason why visual programming isn't more widely used, I think it's just a barrier to entry. Why invest time in a language that is incompatible and will never be popular? The editor needs to be cross-platform (something Marten, Prograph CPX and Visula fail on), and really needs to be free. You can't charge £5000 per installation, for the equivalent of Python. Also, visual programming languages are initially slightly baffling, even though they are no more baffling than text.
posted by Calum Grant @ 10:09 PM
1 Comments:
Presumably you are aware of the effort to make an open source version of Prograph (see eg http://www.ospgli.org/). We have a small but fairly enthusiastic community - unfortunately we are all pulling in slightly different directions at present. My personal project involves generating Python, so the library problem which you mention will be solved by co-opting the extensive selection which Python supplies. Python also solves the cross-platform problem to some extent.
I noticed Visula last year sometime (see http://www.ospgli.org/devwiki/index.php?title=Mwp_Recent_Reading and scroll down) - I hope I don't sound too dismissive :-) .
Lack of effective cooperation is one of the biggest problems we have in the OSPGLI, and it pains me that you are yet another VPL enthusiast working alone. Perhaps you could persuade me to work on Visula, or I could persuade you to join the OPSGLI or even help with my project :-)
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