Path: utzoo!utgpu!watmath!att!rutgers!ucsd!swrinde!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!ficc!peter From: peter@ficc.uu.net (Peter da Silva) Newsgroups: comp.lang.visual,comp.lang.misc Subject: Re: metaphor and programming Message-ID: <7000@ficc.uu.net> Date: 16 Nov 89 15:20:25 GMT References: <13770@orstcs.CS.ORST.EDU> Reply-To: peter@ficc.uu.net (Peter da Silva) Organization: Xenix Support, FICC Lines: 21 You know, a case could be made that a spreadhseet *is* a visual programming language. I think visual languages would be most closely related to the dataflow metaphor. That is the most dimensionally ordered one. Think of building UNIX shell programs by fitting together pipes to little tanks called "awk" and "sed"... But visual programming generally seems to be concentrated on database type things, expressed by turning a relation into a tree. The problem is that this tree is essentially linear: people don't need the extra dimension to comprehend it. In fact the 2-d representation conflicts with the 1-d representation of trees we're taught in school: algebraic notation. Perhaps a visual shell for UNIX would be a useful place to start. -- `-_-' Peter da Silva . 'U` -------------- +1 713 274 5180. "vi is bad because it didn't work after I put jelly in my keyboard." -- Jeffrey W Percival (jwp@larry.sal.wisc.edu)