The Visual Programming Language; A Strange Cyber-Poem About Catfooding Your Own Unicorn

Preface

I wrote this strange work, as part of a poem about your empolyer, respecting your focus and creativity, by giving you a private office.

As employers go, many of which would laugh at this idea, I wrote the following to help you dream about programming solo.

And more importantly, multiplying your programmer power by catfooding your own unicorn.

Remember, you deserve all the respect in the world, as you are meant to grow all the way up[ and become a great being.

You need top move fast, can’t debug other peoples layers of bug-fixes.

So you need a head start, and that is the browser, the DOM, the SVG.

Nd you will need to code your own OOP, where ll properties er observable.

SO you read with a getter, and subscribe with a .on.

Now you just use swing as inspiration, Just componet as base class, and then continer and control.

I recommend Vbox Hbox from flex, for your layout, a VPL needs simple layout.

Then use Blender’s geometry nodes as design inspiration, and while you should code your input boxes from scratch.

You don’t want to forget how everything works, so use esbuild to give you the power of svelt.

And embed svelte components in SVG’s foreignElement.

You should create a concept of domains, or windows, with tools unique to those domains.

So in one window you have visual programming nodes, for mapping table relationships,

In another you have nodes for Filter, Map, and Reduce, and other windows with other programming models.

And as with nodes, you can connect windows together.

While you should generate code, making an XML file for object instantiation.

Gives you the ability to code by hand, in a text editor, and you will need that during development.

But listen, npm’s cheerio wraps XML, so you get jQuery over xml, no trouble here.

The objects you should consider instantiation, s opposed to the code you should be generating.

Would be based on the Event Emitter, it will be messy, because you will pile data in to a tree of emitters.

It it was plain functions, you would know when your program is done.

The emitter networks will need to signal at each leaf, that you can move on to the next one.

But that is, pleasant programming.

The thing about code generation, is that you should dive into AST wrangling.

And that is not really edit programs, they are meant to be edited in text, not via codemods.

But, there is a question of shouldn't you, manage some executions patters that execute all the part of a program.

Like say a state machine, to which you attach all the funcions.

Which then brings us back to XML, why wound’t immediateExecution EventEmitters be just as good.

The code is generated, everything is managed precisely.

Control flow is not very readable, but you have a visual programming language, and don’t need to read it.

So every visual block in your VPL is backed by an EventEmitter, you can now do do step by step message passing.

And have blinkenlights help you trace packets of information, as they flow through you event emitter networks.

I am sorry to speak like this, but explaining all the gibberish would just make it worse.

The point is, you use SVG to make a VPL, that spits out programs weaved out of EventEmitter networks.

And the final step, is making it game like, including a store where nodes can be puchased.

This is not a big undertaking, though it will take years, all of which will be fun.

And then you just share, let your users sell plugins and blocks, and take a cut.

And that is all, your users advertise you to their customers, you take cut of their sales, and you call it you little company.

Finally, critics who say EventEmitter based apps are no good, need to understand that this is just a convenient expression.

The underlying XML, which is just nodes that point to serverless-friendly functions, and edges that connect them.

Can be expressed as funcions, too, it is nodes, their ports and edges that connect the ports.

Output port is the main function, input ports are just arguments that it receives.

EventEmitter Networs are just, beautiful.

And move readable in a visual programming language, then code stored in a src folder tree.

Redux is a visual program, and that is often enough to make an application go.

In a visual programming language, you can make redux loop visual, and the commands as well.

You can have a window with a tree of your components, all windows arranged in a row.

Code readability is very precious, visual programming languages maximize that value.

And your signups, will appreciate being able to grok their program structure at a glance.