I have used LabVIEW, among other visual languages, and built systems with 1,000+ VIs, which are the fundamental building blocks of code organization, and hundreds of classes. LabVIEW has VIs, clusters, classes, libraries, and projects, all of which are useful and required for a well-managed, decoupled code system.
With good software principles, there's nothing that says you can't organize and scale visual code well.
I one time interviewed at a place that had swore off LabVIEW and were moving to Python. The reasons of switching from LabVIEW were the same tired reasons of organizational issues. When I asked to see their Python code, they showed me a single Python file over 10,000 lines long, and there were function signatures that were over 20 lines long. That was just the function signatures. This example, along with many more, and my experience in both visual languages and text-based languages make me very skeptical about claims about not being able to organize and scale code in visual languages.
We see the tangle representing a complex system and say the tangle is ugly. We hide the tangle in text and names and say it is better. There is something odd there.
That the tangle is perceived to be uglier than the word.... is it that our brains deal better with a sliding window of symbols rather than gazing upon the sprawled true tentacled glory of some large algorithmic expression?
The promise of VP is that the program is the architecture is the monitoring tools.
Should we learn to love the sprawl?
So, I'm making two parallel attempts at this again. One more serious ( https://youtu.be/sqvHjXfbI8o?si=-PDXQes5i4JglBQj&t=411 ) and one as a game/exploration.
The first will be for tiny machine-generated programs linked together, which will be for a research project. The second is for an abstract physics game which will be for learning, fun, and hopefully some tiny profit on Steam. (Will appear here https://store.steampowered.com/search/?publisher=My64K when playable)
In, both I am adding severe constraints to the VP design but the game one will be the most interesting. I'm looking to add a kind of cellular automata mediated physics that also provides gradual automated optimization. Think programming in Minecraft with Redstone but with multiple dimensions and a regular polygon substrate. The key ideas I am exploring in both are:
1) Can we design a substrate that enforces some order that solves the tangle problem?
2) Within a substrate, can an algorithm be "crystalized" or "folded" into something recognisable by its shape?
I am starting next week. I have six months off work. It should be fun.
