Human-centric computing??
I am now ready to go to the conference (VL/HCC 2006) and present. I have managed to squeeze the talk down into 12 minutes.
I have come to the conclusion that nobody cares about visual programming. This is evident from the complete lack of implementations. It was also clear that only one of my reviewers (of the three) knew anything about visual programming at all. None of them bothered to look at the website or try to use the software.
To make matters worse, the next conference (VL/HCC 2007) does not even include visual programming or languages on its list of topics at all! I can clearly see that they will rename the conference to HCC'08 in the future.
It has been argued that visual programming is more suitable for end-users and novices. That is fine, except for the problem that most programming in this world is done by experienced programmers. It depends on what you mean by "programming".
The VL-part of VL/HCC hasn't happened because the world has so much invested in textual languages. After a while, people concluded that VPLs don't work. This is not true, they just haven't been available. When I set out to create Visula, my starting thesis was that it would suck and wouldn't work. But guess what - with a bit of experimentation I created a system that worked absolutely fine.
If you think about it, nobody is actually going to create new VPLs. Final-year project students aren't going to because the task is much too large. University research projects aren't because researchers aren't usually that experienced at programming, and nobody could get funding for such a project. Companies aren't going to create VPLs because there is no money in writing new programming languages. That leaves the open-source community, who do it for the love of it.
It will be interesting to see if my opinion about human-centric computing goes up or down after this conference. I will also see if I can meet anybody who actually gives a damn about visual programming. It was such a hot-topic 10-15 years ago, now where has it gone?
I am now ready to go to the conference (VL/HCC 2006) and present. I have managed to squeeze the talk down into 12 minutes.
I have come to the conclusion that nobody cares about visual programming. This is evident from the complete lack of implementations. It was also clear that only one of my reviewers (of the three) knew anything about visual programming at all. None of them bothered to look at the website or try to use the software.
To make matters worse, the next conference (VL/HCC 2007) does not even include visual programming or languages on its list of topics at all! I can clearly see that they will rename the conference to HCC'08 in the future.
It has been argued that visual programming is more suitable for end-users and novices. That is fine, except for the problem that most programming in this world is done by experienced programmers. It depends on what you mean by "programming".
The VL-part of VL/HCC hasn't happened because the world has so much invested in textual languages. After a while, people concluded that VPLs don't work. This is not true, they just haven't been available. When I set out to create Visula, my starting thesis was that it would suck and wouldn't work. But guess what - with a bit of experimentation I created a system that worked absolutely fine.
If you think about it, nobody is actually going to create new VPLs. Final-year project students aren't going to because the task is much too large. University research projects aren't because researchers aren't usually that experienced at programming, and nobody could get funding for such a project. Companies aren't going to create VPLs because there is no money in writing new programming languages. That leaves the open-source community, who do it for the love of it.
It will be interesting to see if my opinion about human-centric computing goes up or down after this conference. I will also see if I can meet anybody who actually gives a damn about visual programming. It was such a hot-topic 10-15 years ago, now where has it gone?
posted by Calum Grant at
2:13 pm
1 Comments:
Just a test!
By
Calum Grant, at 9:53 am
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