Visual Programming, mTropolis, Chipwits and Revolution

[Sivakatirswami]

I don't do dbase much now, but did years ago... I don't know if any  
of you ever remember a remarkable implementation of this in the early  
Mac relational dBase called "Helix" way back when. I thought it was  
very powerful in my naivete in those days when playing with it next  
to Hypercard... thinking "this is neat I don't have to do any  
scripting at all," and for simple stuff it was brilliantly free of  
code. But in reality, I ended up actually doing really intricate  
things in Hypercard...

With Helix when you started getting like 20 tables in your database  
with all kinds of relationships going, this incredible visual maze  
started to build up with lines going everywhere... you had to drag  
out the icons to make room to make sure things were clear, and you  
would have  needed to get a wide format printer to print the thing  
(if you wanted to) and the map would have probably been about eight  
feet long three feet tall, an exaggeration of course, but you get the  
point. Past a certain point, the development process ground down to  
molasses pace. I was a bit of Helix advocate for a very short while,  
but our IT team here responsible for development took one look and  
said "no way!"  They went with Acius 4D in the end. It has a great  
balance between visual representation of tables and field  
relationships and raw code procedures... I think Helix died.

Richard is right... programming, especially xTalk, (because it is so  
un-onerous) is actually a break from the helter skelter of external  
life and you slip into a stream of pristine clarity and focus if you  
get real mental space to do this work. Of course if you talk like  
that to anyone, they think you are nuts (smile).

On Dec 03, 2005, at 2:11 PM, Richard Gaskin wrote:

> He said that while iconic programming had a lot of value for simple  
> things, to do anything complex meant creating diagrams that were  
> difficult to read, and that ultimately a substantial program like  
> even a basic text editor would be as hard to read expressed purely  
> visually as it would be in textual code.
>