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luciana1utoday at 12:00 PM6 repliesview on HN

the problem is every visual programming tool eventually reaches the point where you need a 'code node' and then everyone just writes code


Replies

seemazetoday at 4:01 PM

It's a good onramp to building a programmatic intuition, but you're correct that it very quickly gets left behind once the 'magic' is understood. If you do a quick image search for , e.g. Rhino3D Grasshopper, Blender Geometry Nodes, Vectorworks Marionette, Autodesk Dynamo, ComfyUI, you'll quickly see the implementations of the real world procedures users are crafting become unwieldy rather fast.

I can't tell you why an 80 column wall of characters is easier to reason about than a visual graph, but I assume it has something to do with the reason Mitch Hedberg does not like arrows[0]; look, a function.. let's got that way.

[0] https://youtu.be/EI1DBRz3JLk?si=DCLNkbeCGWyw-Ceu

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mbreesetoday at 3:39 PM

I don't think this is for people that would just write code. Maybe you need that pressure release to get some edge cases, but for the most part, if you're using a visual programming tool, you are trying to avoid the code part for some reason.

So, I don't see that limit as something that's all that bad.

whynotmaybetoday at 12:59 PM

Should we call this luciana1u's law?

If BizTalk has it, why shouldn't my visual programming tool have it?

rickdeckardtoday at 2:29 PM

and then the evolution of the whole tool slows down as the answer for most limitations in native functions becomes "just use the 'code node' and write the function there" :)

m463today at 3:52 PM

as someone who writes code, examples 2/3 are non-intuitive

(maybe more context would help)

bbqbbqbbqtoday at 1:01 PM

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