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   Colin Strasser (colinstrasser@c.im)'s status on Saturday, 29-Jul-2023 08:08:11 JST Colin Strasser

   • Thomas 🔭🕹️

   @thomasfuchs Before LLMs, the only visual programming system that really caught on (i.e., non-programmers making real software in production) was Excel. I think LLMs are going to be as big as that.

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     Chris Hanson (eschaton@mastodon.social)'s status on Saturday, 29-Jul-2023 08:15:25 JST Chris Hanson

     in reply to

     • Thomas 🔭🕹️

     @thomasfuchs The problem with “graphical programming will save us all” is that it tried to optimize the wrong problem: Textual programming complexity. Yes, people have varying levels of difficulty when it comes to using text to program, and some of that is caused by needless complexity in language and environment design. However, a complex application is still a complex application regardless of whether it’s written with Prograph or Swift.

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     Chris Hanson (eschaton@mastodon.social)'s status on Saturday, 29-Jul-2023 08:15:26 JST Chris Hanson

     • Thomas 🔭🕹️

     @thomasfuchs Except—you can! There were large numbers of complex business applications built in Prograph and Sirius Developer, and lots of instrumentation is still built around LabView.

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     Joe Cooper 💾 (swelljoe@mas.to)'s status on Saturday, 29-Jul-2023 08:16:02 JST Joe Cooper 💾

     • Thomas 🔭🕹️

     @thomasfuchs drifting off into daydreams thinking about the Hypercard future we could have had.

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     Chris Hanson (eschaton@mastodon.social)'s status on Saturday, 29-Jul-2023 08:23:22 JST Chris Hanson

     in reply to

     • Thomas 🔭🕹️

     @thomasfuchs This is one of the things that’s also doomed environments like Smalltalk; plain text has some very, *very* important benefits when used for programming, particularly in the form of long-term maintainability, interoperability, portability, and interoperability. Maintaining one or more “environment” systems over time is much more difficult, simply because comparing between variants is incredibly complex and often not possible except within the system itself.

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     Chris Hanson (eschaton@mastodon.social)'s status on Saturday, 29-Jul-2023 08:23:23 JST Chris Hanson

     in reply to

     • Thomas 🔭🕹️

     @thomasfuchs An enormous amount of factory automation and instrumentation was created in the 1980s using “Rocky Mountain BASIC” on HP 9000-series GPIB instrumentation controllers. (This is what HP’s 68000-based HP 9000-200/300/400 systems were the fanciest versions of.

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     Chris Hanson (eschaton@mastodon.social)'s status on Saturday, 29-Jul-2023 08:23:23 JST Chris Hanson

     in reply to

     • Thomas 🔭🕹️

     @thomasfuchs All of that was *a lot* more maintainbale and discoverable than modern rats’ nests of LabView diagrams; LabView mostly won that market on the cost and ubiquity of PC hardware while still interoperating with existing GPIB deployments, not by being better. (And Rocky Mountain BASIC was a solid structured BASIC, not a toy BASIC like on microcomputers.)

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     Elijah Waxwing (elijah@kolektiva.social)'s status on Saturday, 29-Jul-2023 08:34:52 JST Elijah Waxwing

     • Thomas 🔭🕹️

     @thomasfuchs you survive long enough in tech you see the hype cycle like mayflies... Push media, VRML, collective intelligence, nosql, p2p. The thing is that eventually these things often come back a second or third time. Push media died and then podcasts actually happened years later. VRML died and metaverse is trying to bring it back. Companies keep trying and failing to make money on delivery, in waves.

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     cdaringe (cdaringe@hachyderm.io)'s status on Saturday, 29-Jul-2023 10:13:39 JST cdaringe

     • Thomas 🔭🕹️

     @thomasfuchs I’m not convinced that VPLs are actually dead! Having evaluated many, im more just convinced that so little attempts have been tried that a complete and awesome enough one has surfaced. node-red does ok, enso seems promising but slow going, and the rest i think didnt dream big enough for a GPL contender. Domain specific VPLs for gaming and music I think are currently largely celebrated. Im optimistic that a GPL VPL is still on its way. Call me naive :)

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     Mikey P (mikey_p@mas.to)'s status on Sunday, 30-Jul-2023 05:32:23 JST Mikey P

     • Thomas 🔭🕹️

     @thomasfuchs yeah, but I still miss HyperCard. Never would have got into programming without it.

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     Mikey P (mikey_p@mas.to)'s status on Sunday, 30-Jul-2023 05:44:15 JST Mikey P

     • Thomas 🔭🕹️

     @thomasfuchs what version is that? I ended up asking my parents to buy me the boxed version around 96, and it came with several thick manuals and reference books.