google blocky

[Paul Tarvydas]

Not FBP, but

(1) maybe useful for expressing the innards of a component, or

(2) useful stealable code / ideas, or

(3) maybe the "inspiration" for a js-fbp that runs inside a browser?

http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2012/06/google-blockly/

At first it's not obvious how to use it. Load "demos/index.html" into a browser.

pt

[Dan]

Google Blockly is reminiscent of Scratch we have discussed about in another post.
I think it very misleading just because "visual" is so powerful. In fact Google Blockly (also Scratch) is just a visual translation of the classical imperative programming and it is not related at all to "data flow" or "flow based programming". It is control flow oriented: what you pass along is the control not data.
Visual programming in general is data flow oriented where Blockly or Scratch are not. I understand that this kind of platforms are very nice and appealing for kids to learn programming so it will be a new force to push kids away from the more natural way of thinking (i.e. parallel data flow).

Regards,
Dan

[Brad Cox]

On Sun, Jun 17, 2012 at 10:30 AM, Dan <dpol...@gmail.com> wrote:

... so it will be a new force to push kids away from the more natural way of thinking (i.e. parallel data flow).

... to the tune of "how ya gonna keep them down on the farm once they've seen Pareeee" ;)

Simple. Use the force against them. Graphics work even better with FBP. Here's one crack at it

[Paul Tarvydas]

The way I see it, at some point you want to put "some code" into (the innards of) a box.

 

My preference is that this "code" be also composed of diagrams.  StateCharts (modified) are a great way to express control flow within a component (transitions are "structured" gotos).

 

Blocky *might* be another kind of innard diagram - sequential programming.

 

You should "never" need to use a text editor.

 

Jonathan Edwards' "subtext" would be another nice way to enter code.

 

(And, not being a js expert, I see blocky as something that could be ripped off for presentation techniques).

 

pt

[Forrest Oliphant]

I'm planning on doing just this--a Blockly logic module--for meemoo.org. My goal for this is to make more complex apps possible to program on a touchscreen, minimizing typing.

- Forrest

[Paul Morrison]

Don't want to be picky, but https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_programming_language
says there is Google Blockly *and* something called Blocky, by one
David O'Toole - both visual languages. I assume this thread is
talking about the former, but I'm not sure...!

[Paul Morrison]

Hi Paul (and Henri), the latest version of DrawFBP allows you to
associate source code with a block in the diagram. Right now, it only
supports text, but is essentially language-agnostic. However, your
post implies that, in the future, you might want to associate some
kind of visual logic with an FBP block - we could give this a try.
Feel free to get more concrete on this, and we can do some
experimenting :-)

[Sam Watkins]

On Mon, Jul 09, 2012 at 08:41:57AM -0700, Paul Morrison wrote:
> Hi Paul (and Henri), the latest version of DrawFBP allows you to
> associate source code with a block in the diagram. Right now, it only
> supports text, but is essentially language-agnostic. However, your
> post implies that, in the future, you might want to associate some
> kind of visual logic with an FBP block - we could give this a try.
> Feel free to get more concrete on this, and we can do some
> experimenting :-)

I have some ideas on graphical programming, like prolog but applied
to math, sets, lists, bit logic. For control, I think
state transitions and flow charts are essentially similar.

So, I would very much like to talk about this graphical programming,
and develop something.

But we can easily translate graphs to concise text, or text to graphs;
so there's no point arguing which way is better, it's easy to do both.
Compilers translate text code into a tree or graph model anyway.


Sam

--
I got in the habit to say 'bit' instead of 'boolean',
I use 'bit' as the boolean type in my code.

I'd like to use 'exec' for control-flow transitions in net2sh (!),
but there are issues with buffered input. I could fix that with
a 'push-back pipe' construct, and use a process or two for each pipe.
Actually I think I might need more than one process for each pipe.
Eek, too many processes...