A personal history of visual programming environments (2021)

This page summarizes the projects mentioned and recommended in the original post on news.ycombinator.com

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  • unit

    Next Generation Visual Programming System (by samuelmtimbo)

  • I enjoyed reading this. I knew of quartz composer but I never did anything with it.

    I love visual tools and I think they are underutilized today. I cut my teeth in ~2005 with Houdini[0] and Fusion[1] which are both heavily graph / node based (and procedural).

    Most recently I have been rekindling my love for visual programming and flow based programming and plan to spend some time in January and February doing more research around flow based programming for infrastructure management.

    I plan to get this sort of info published on my website which I have neglected for half a decade or more but if you are interested in visual programming you might enjoy checking these out:

    Unit from Samuel Timbó:

    https://github.com/samuelmtimbo/unit

    https://ioun.it/

    A video of me exploring what I figured out about it (while also learning to stream) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vwknTfGVDq8

    Behave-Graph from Ben Houston:

    https://github.com/bhouston/behave-graph

    And the products I learned so long ago

    [0] Houdini https://www.sidefx.com/products/houdini/

    [1] Fusion https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/products/fusion

  • behave-graph

    Open, extensible, small and simple behaviour-graph execution engine. Discord here: https://discord.gg/mrags8WyuH

  • I enjoyed reading this. I knew of quartz composer but I never did anything with it.

    I love visual tools and I think they are underutilized today. I cut my teeth in ~2005 with Houdini[0] and Fusion[1] which are both heavily graph / node based (and procedural).

    Most recently I have been rekindling my love for visual programming and flow based programming and plan to spend some time in January and February doing more research around flow based programming for infrastructure management.

    I plan to get this sort of info published on my website which I have neglected for half a decade or more but if you are interested in visual programming you might enjoy checking these out:

    Unit from Samuel Timbó:

    https://github.com/samuelmtimbo/unit

    https://ioun.it/

    A video of me exploring what I figured out about it (while also learning to stream) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vwknTfGVDq8

    Behave-Graph from Ben Houston:

    https://github.com/bhouston/behave-graph

    And the products I learned so long ago

    [0] Houdini https://www.sidefx.com/products/houdini/

    [1] Fusion https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/products/fusion

  • SurveyJS

    Open-Source JSON Form Builder to Create Dynamic Forms Right in Your App. With SurveyJS form UI libraries, you can build and style forms in a fully-integrated drag & drop form builder, render them in your JS app, and store form submission data in any backend, inc. PHP, ASP.NET Core, and Node.js.

    SurveyJS logo
  • scratch-www

    Standalone web client for Scratch

  • Do you mean something like Scratch/Snap!?

    https://scratch.mit.edu/

NOTE: The number of mentions on this list indicates mentions on common posts plus user suggested alternatives. Hence, a higher number means a more popular project.

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