Robert Klemme <shortcutter / googlemail.com> wrote:

> On 30.07.2009 11:23, Mike Stephens wrote:
> > I've just been re-reading Byte August 1981 - an edition dedicated to
> > Smalltalk-80. Often people say Ruby has roots in Smalltalk (amongst
> > other things) but the thing you notice is Smalltalk is visual ie it has
> > a graphical interface. How is it that 28 years later we work by typing
> > text into an editor?
> 
> I do not know a programming language for which the basis is not text.

Google is your friend:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_programming_language

My favorite was Prograph. It wasn't just visual, it was dynamic: if you
hit a bug while running, you could just fix it right then and carry on
from the point of the bug (like Smalltalk, really). It was great for
dataflow, but programming a loop of any kind was a pain.

Nonetheless I'm surprised that after all these years we aren't
programming by assembling parts diagrammatically. I started programming
in 1964 and except for the punch cards nothing much has changed. :) 

OTOH if we *have* to be textual, Ruby strikes a very nice balance
between conciseness and legibility. Objective-C or AppleScript are not
just textual, they're novelistic! m.