Visual Programming Codex

Despite the GUI going mainstream in the 80s, programming seems to have stalled in the era of the terminal and clung to coding with text. Yet there have always been magnificent visual programming projects at the periphery. This repo exists to shine a light on these alternatives, see what costs and benefits they offer, and reflect on the work of people pushing for a future where programming leverages more of our senses and modalities.

1. Implementations — Specific products, projects, or prototypes. Lots of images.
2. Reflections — Talks, articles, and papers broadly about non-textual programming.
3. Galleries — Collections of images of visual languages and related tools.
4. Concepts — The broad range of ideas that visual languages draw on.
5. Inspirations — Visual systems for things that only loosely resemble programming.
6. Criticisms — Arguments against visual programming, and reflections on them.
7. Communities — Places to talk amongst ourselves.
8. Impressions — My 2¢

This is a perpetual work-in-progress, inspired by Shaun Lebron's History of Lisp Parens. It's fallen into a deep slumber, but will likely reawaken at some point in the coming years. If you know of anything that could or should be added, please do open an issue — that's where I've been placing every interesting project that I happen upon.

Also, it's worth flagging that my personal focus is on the node-wire style of visual programming interface. (I don't think there have been any truly great node-wire tools yet, but that it wouldn't be too difficult to make one if someone were sufficiently motivated and did their research.) So given my focus, this repo does a poor job of representing spreadsheets, state charts, block languages, and other presently popular forms of visual programming.

In closing, if you'd like to discuss visual programming, the best place is the Feeling of Computing community, but you can also scroll down to the contact section on my website.