“ In his influential essay No Silver Bullet, Fred Brooks makes the case that software is inherently "invisible and unvisualizable", and points out the universal failure of so-called "visual programming" environments. I don't fault Fred Brooks for his mistake -- the visual programming that he's thinking of indeed has little to offer. But that's because it visualizes the wrong thing.
Traditional visual environments visualize the code. They visualize static structure. But that's not what we need to understand. We need to understand what the code is doing.
Visualize data, not code. Dynamic behavior, not static structure.”
When it comes to audio, most of the above is wrong (or at best, off-base).
Max, PureData and now a new generation of software modular synthesis applications visualize code-that-spews-data-at-other-code. They are used to build highly modifiable (though not dynamic) structures that behave in ways that are often hard to hold in a human mind. They are widely used, much loved, and insanely powerful. They use visualization to add visual memory to the cognitive toolset in ways that textual code does not.
Of course, such tools are unlikely to ever be used build such tools. You don't implement/bootstrap a visual (audio) data flow language using a visual data flow language.
“ In his influential essay No Silver Bullet, Fred Brooks makes the case that software is inherently "invisible and unvisualizable", and points out the universal failure of so-called "visual programming" environments. I don't fault Fred Brooks for his mistake -- the visual programming that he's thinking of indeed has little to offer. But that's because it visualizes the wrong thing.
Traditional visual environments visualize the code. They visualize static structure. But that's not what we need to understand. We need to understand what the code is doing.
Visualize data, not code. Dynamic behavior, not static structure.”
http://worrydream.com/#!/LearnableProgramming