There’s long been a push to stop writing code as a sequence of lines and go to something graphical, which has been very successful in some areas and less so in others. But even when you use something graphical like Scratch, it is really standing in for lines of code? Many graphical environments are really just interface builders, and you still write traditional code underneath. [Masato Hagiwara] asks the question: Can you write code that is actually a 2D graphic? Where the graphical layout isn’t a cover for code, but is the code itself? His answer is Recto.
Whereas a C program, for example, has a syntactical structure of lines, a Recto program has rectangles. Rectangles can contain data, and their structure naturally mimics the kinds of structures we usually use: columns, rows, matrices, and so on. Rectangles can also contain… wait for it… other rectangles. Special rectangles act as dictionaries or sets.
We thought this sort of reminded us of Lisp, and, in fact, [Hagiwara] makes that clear later in the post. The real problem is how do you…write? draw?… this kind of code? At first, he laid it out in a spreadsheet before compilation. Now he’s built an editor for it, and you can try it in your browser. There’s also a limited-feature compiler that can handle simple programs.
[Hagiwara] goes on to show how this representation would work for natural human languages, too. Honestly, we have enough trouble with English and the few other human languages we struggle with, but it is interesting to contemplate.
If you like strange languages, there’s Piet. Not that either of these is the weirdest we’ve ever seen.
You want reasonable graphic programming? Try DRAKON.
This looks more like snusp than lisp.
We do write graphical code where it makes sense: simulink, scicos, “ladders” in plc.
Few years back I was supposed to “write software” for PLC to control pneumatic hammers. Code was simple – each hammer was controlled by one DO – all in all 32 hammers. One by one to be triggered every X seconds (where X is either 10 or 20 sec.).
Anyway – Codesys (i think it was it) allowed to choose which language I want to use. I chose pascal style code to make it short and easy to write. But my boss wanted to use some “diagram style graphs” (not even ladder). It took me much more time and it was much less readable.
Recto looks like someone was trying to make whitespace even more important than in Python, but didn’t want to go all the way to the actual Whitespace programming language.
I was going to ask if Python was considered a “graphical” programming language…
Programming — writing program code, that is — is really simple. What’s not so straightforward is articulating the problem and stating it in a form that’s logical and obvious. No amount of ‘language du jour’ will fix this basic fact of life.