Visual Programming for Industrial Controls

[enigm...@gmail.com]

Hi Folks,

I haven't been part of the conference, but I've been looking for
emerging higher level tools for allowing non-programmers/designers to
express their ideas in a visual format, particularly targeted control
systems for industrial applications.

Just wondering, from those of you who may have attended, if there were
any ideas presented that might be suitable for that environment?

Thanks!

[Tom Van Cutsem]

Hi,

Two languages that I recall had visual PL influences were Thyrd by Phil Mercurio and Kodu by Matt MacLaurin.

Also, while he didn't talk about it explicitly at ELC, Jonathan Edwards' subtext might be worth checking out (there's an interesting screencast about it at http://www.subtextual.org/ )

Cheers,

Tom

2010/7/26 Enigm...@gmail.com <enigm...@gmail.com>

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[Sean Jensen-Grey]

You should take a look at

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ladder_logic

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LabVIEW language "G"

I think it would be nice to combine ladder logic with subtext (for compact case statements) along with a tool to prove that your state machine couldn't get stuck.

A Tool for Practical Reasoning about State Machine Designs

http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.39.9715

The wikipedia page on visual languages has a rich selection of examples.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Visual_programming_languages

It might be fairly easy to extend http://www.pypes.org/ to include ideas from subtext, esp if one used the colored block syntax from scratch.

http://blog.srinivasan.biz/software/scratch-is-fun

Sean