Ganeshnomicks

I want to concentrate the things I do, not the magical rules of the language, like starting with public void something something something to say, “print hello world.” I just want to say, “print this!” I don’t want all the surrounding magic keywords. I just want to concentrate on the task. That’s the basic idea.

- Yukihiro Matsumoto (Matz) founder of Ruby

We have all been part of programming language debates: Ruby vs Python, PHP vs Perl, C vs C++ and so on… but I guess one thing thats common is that all these are programming languages. Sure they differ in paradigm, in syntax and in lot of other things. But one thing remains common: we are expressing the algorithm in the form of a written code. That remains same in all the languages.

When we write code in a programming language…what we do is write simplified code, abiding by certain principles, that in turn is converted into complex code(machine language code) by the compiler. So instead of writing this supposedly simple code I was thinking about other simpler and efficient alternatives available.

Basically there must be an alternative to writing code. I mean another way execute and express an algorithm.

One of them is Visual Programming. In visual programming, programming is done by using a graphical approach. Lets see what wikipedia has to say:

A visual programming language (VPL) is any programming language that lets users create programs by manipulating program elements graphically rather than by specifying them textually… Many VPLs are based on the idea of “boxes and arrows,” where boxes or other screen objects are treated as entities, connected by arrows, lines or arcs which represent relations.

I was first introduced to Visual programming three years ago in the form of Mindscript. Thinking about an alternative to programming languages I recently started experimenting with it(with little success). It seems to be in an abandoned state right now, considering the last update was four years ago. There is clearly a lack of documentation and support for this project else it could have flourished(could have had wings and flown…OMG!)

Its like a flowchart being executable. Wouldnt that be awesome(:P)? I know lot of people(including me) prefer code over flowcharts but that might be because we havent made many flowcharts whereas we’ve written thousands of lines of code.

Sure I dont see visual programming replacing programming languages anytime soon but I do believe that we should give them a shot. Also we should look for other means of programming. And yeah I’d love to hear from you(cliched?) so please comment!