Category: Life

Introduction

So I’ve been mulling the idea for creating a visual programming environment for quite some time. I’m a firm believer that creating simple applications should be no more complicated than getting a handle on Excel or Access. That you could really reduce wasted time if there was an ability for individuals to automate.

This continues and mildly revises my previous post on the subject.

GUI Driven Development

Graphical User Interfaces (GUIs) encapsulate in a very quick and approachable way the basic gist of what your program does. More or less unless there’s a button for it, your application won’t do it.

I argue that in this visual programming environment, the GUI would be what you put together first. And that the complexity of putting it together, as a baseline, should be no more than that of putting mockups together with tools such as Balsamiq, pictured below.

And then it would be from that that your program logic would be dictated. Kind of something like pictured below.

I think it’s important to keep in mind that when people who aren’t that familiar with programming visualize programs, what they’re thinking of isn’t the logic behind the scene that will make it happen. They think of how it will look. How it will behave emanates from that.

I think that that pattern of thinking should be reflected in the environment they use.

Maintaining Relevancy

Keeping on the theme of GUI Driven Development would be to let users create the interfaces that are in keeping with the software they actually use. That means allowing for some of the design patterns we see in mobile apps – flicking panes, for instance – in addition to the standard repository of widgets.

You want people to be able to create applications that look like the “real” software they use. None of this standard input/output on the command-line. The command-line interface is extremely valuable, but it’s also not what the target audience for this programming environment would want to put together.

Code as a First Class Citizen

After having seen someone use visual programming to carry a rather big project into production, it became clear that using visual elements to dictate program logic was at times really unwieldy.

There was a few problems. One, the issue of clutter. Big programs became a wire diagram so complicated that reading and interpreting the code would have been easier to understand.

That can solved by grouping blocks into hierarchies and traversing them through these hierarchies using an infinite canvas, ideas I spoke of in my previous post. But I think also by really supporting the inclusion of code. I had also mentioned the support for integrating code before as well, and had drawn up this kind of concept:

I think what has changed is the idea that this ought to be a first class citizen in this programming environment, such that it wouldn’t be an impairment as compared to dictating logic using visual block elements. That means really reducing the boiler plate involved in the example provided by the picture above, as well.

Forgetting Performance

I had spoken of parallelism in the previous post. I think concurrency is inherent to a visual programming environment like this, parallelism less so. And I think I would drop some concepts I had the last time, like explicitly passing arrays from block to block.

This model for the construction of software would likely yield worse performance than any other solution out there. That’s okay, because unless you’re talking about processing data, that hit isn’t usually noticeable to a user. Furthermore, the end goal is to create a means of developing software that is easy to use. And in that context, performance isn’t the prime consideration.

Collaboration

In the previous post I talked about integrating code revisioning into the programming environment. Such that you could, with the aid of a slider, view how code changed over each of a branch’s revisions. Then you could create a new branch from any one point.

But I also think that a page should be taken out of the likes of GitHub in terms of how to collaborate with code. I would introduce the ability to graphically annotate blocks for code reviews, and enable discussions.

Conclusion

Writing the back-end to make this all happen is quite straight forward. I can put together an interpreter and debugger rather quickly. What’s really challenging is actually creating the user interface: the front-end.

There’s nothing out there that seems like a good match for what I’m trying to achieve. I’ve been playing around with QtQuick, which is great for presenting items and handling user interaction. However, it’s not designed to cope with custom shapes like those I’d need to generate a dynamic flow chart.

So what I’m looking at now is something like jsPlumb to implement the flowchart with a WebKit-powered HTML5 front-end. The back-end would then handle compiling the code, and the two would talk to each other using web sockets. I want to ditch all the ideas like an infinite canvas to get the idea at its most basic running – and then I’ll worry about growing the project from there.

On June 10th 2003, the first legal same-sex marriage was performed in Ontario. Two years later, it would be legal across the country.

It was an important milestone as it very visibly undermined one of the many ways that queers were being othered. But if you were to listen to the discussion around queer issues today, and around this ten year mark in particular, you’d swear that everything is now peachy Canada. If you listen to the political parties, if you listen to various gay organizations even, what they’re talking about are marriage and discrimination abroad. The home front is seen as a done deal.

Granted, there is some talk about issues over here – but that talk only finds a supportive note if it’s around the only form of queerdom that’s attained social acceptability: same-sex attraction. So that’s what the media attention revolves around: incidences of rural homophobia, bullying, and suicides of gay youth.

These issues absolutely merit attention, and are not isolated incidents but reflective of entrenched prejudices that are so normalized as to become invisible. My beef isn’t that there is coverage of these issues, it’s that all other narratives – queer narratives – are denied space.

But that’s how marginalization works. For other issues to be perceived as legitimate, the people themselves have to be seen as legitimate – and that’s not the case in Canada.

Take the plight of trans folks. In the last Ontario election, a major political party was able to distribute vitriolic literature that called this segment of the population a threat to children. In federal politics a few months ago, MPs were saying that trans women existed to prey on women.

This is not the exception. This is the norm. The environment we have is toxic. Street harassment is extremely common. Suicide and homelessness rates for trans folk are far higher than gay folk, bashings are too common, but you’ll almost never hear about any of that. Meanwhile even protections on gender expression are thought to be so out there that MPs removed it from an anti-discrimination bill.

Our society only thinks it’s tolerant because it views the perspective of everyone it doesn’t tolerate as illegitimate. We are far from accepting.

And I guess I’m most bothered that events on “LGBT rights” that are more or less just occasions to have people say how things are nice now for the average urban white cis-gendered middle-class working-age able-bodied gay person. There’s no recognition of how dismal things are for other queers – even other gays.

Where do you hear about how retirement homes can be so bad that gay seniors have to go back in the closet? Where is the solidarity with Ontario students in Catholic schools, which distribute bigoted literature calling them intrinsically disordered? Where is the anger that sex education in Ontario is being silenced because it’s daring to acknowledge the existence of non-heterosexuals? It’s the perfect venue to talk about it, but no one does.

And I think it’s because lots of gay folk, in particular those middle-class urban gays who have come to occupy the rights discourse, believe in the same system of oppression that once viewed their existence as a problem. They’re the type that think Pride would be better if there weren’t those icky leather men there, the type that view poly families with contempt, the type that view gender non-conforming individuals with disgust.

Meanwhile, they’ve eviscerated the agents of change that created the space they now inhabit. Pride in the major cities is more or less just a commercial event now, with decisions made to remove any political element as its objectionable. Because affirming your own self in a world that seeks to police you from existence is objectionable.

Ten years. Lots has changed. More hasn’t.

So I’ve talked before about little changes that helped improve my quality of life. Like no longer wearing a watch and not depending on an alarm clock to wake up (though university time demands no longer make that latter one possible.)

There’s another ‘lifehack’ I’d like to add to the mix: unplugging. When I’m spending all that time transiting each day, I make a conscious effort to avoid engaging in distractions. Whether that’s reading, listening to podcasts, watching videos on my phone, etc.

I’ll just turn it all off. Instead, I’ll look out the window. And I’ll think. Or I won’t. That’s good too. But I find some time to just let my mind breathe.

My days are already otherwise consumed between shifting between different states of distraction. It’s good, I find, just to be free of that – if only for a bus ride.