Lily

[hurle...@googlemail.com]

Hi Guys,

For some reason, I've recently been intrigued by the state of
graphical, or visual programming languages. Sadly, it seems to me the
vast majority are maintained by companies who want your money to use
them and generally they seem to be very much domain specific. However,
I've stumbled across Lily which I thought was nice enough to bring to
the attention of enthusiasts like yourselves: http://www.lilyapp.org/
.

It's very much in the vein of Max/MSP and puredata and installs as a
firefox app. It's very, very young at the moment, but what does exist
is quite easy to get to grips with and seemed quite stable, though
most of the graphics intense demos were slow, which perhaps isn't very
surprising. What I particularly liked was that you can "unlock" the
examples, then right-click on the various objects to discover more
information about that object's type (e.g. what the ports do etc.) and
the documentation is itself a "patch" that you can run or unlock.

It seems that the language is geared towards graphical and audio
processing, which seems to be a common desire with these sorts of
languages. One thing that seemed to be missing was the ability to run
patches within each other, i.e. to treat them like function calls.
Indeed, what I was hoping to find was an open source graphical
programming language that was flexible enough to support the
development of DSLs within it, but it doesn't look like any such thing
currently exists.

Anyway, hope this interests some of you, and do let me know if you
have leads on the Holy Grail :D

Mark

[Thomas Figg]

2009/8/17 hurle...@googlemail.com <hurle...@googlemail.com>:

>
> Hi Guys,
>
> For some reason, I've recently been intrigued by the state of
> graphical, or visual programming languages.

The most recent project I've seen is http://subtextual.org/.

I am yet to see a visual language that doesn't come at the expense
of text editing :)

--tef

[Mark Sutherland]

2009/8/18 Thomas Figg <thoma...@gmail.com>:

Ah cool, thanks! Looks interesting. His Manifesto has some interesting
points: http://alarmingdevelopment.org/?p=5

Mark