This was odd...

Some cherry-picked quotes from the manifesto: http://alarmingdevelopment.org/index.php?p=5

- Visual languages are not the solution: ... common idea is to replace AST structures with some form of graphical diagram. ...

- Programming is not Mathematics

- Change is natural: There has been much effort expended to remove the concept of mutable state from programming, to be replaced by immutable values as in mathematics. This is entirely misguided. ... Monads are a reductio ad absurdum. [ Heresy! :-) ]

- Control flow considered harmful: ... The primary reason for this is to permit side-effects to be ordered by the programmer. ... [ This appears to contradict the criticism of monads. ]

But then the demo shows us how to define a Factorial function using an editor that (AFAICT) is simply operating on AST structures, in a tree-oriented layout. I must be missing something.

Alistair.

Yes, it is a bit of a twist. I came across this thing a couple of days ago on the LtU blog, and somehow thought it relevant to the issue of visual programming. I'm curious why the author himself doesn't consider this to be a visual programming language, considering that the language only allows you to program by copying and pasting. stijn.