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Question for you:

What are the most interesting examples of visual programming? What ideas would you propose?

I'll want to incorporate them into a graphics workstation hypothetical...

Text-based programming is so ingrained, I'm struggling to think beyond it!

@alcinnz Have you ever looked at the VisualAge Smalltalk system by IBM? I think that was a pretty interesting approach at the time. It was very centered around UI design, and attaching actions to the various UI elements.

They tried applying the same approach to other languages later, like Rexx and C++, but especially the last one did not work as well conceptually.

There's GUI design tools today that look somewhat similar to this, but don't really get to the same level and elegance that the original VisualAge Smalltalk system did. At least from how I remember it. It's been a few years...
alcinnz

@harald I'm having trouble researching VisualAge SmallTalk. Do you have any links you can sure?

@alcinnz Seems the web isn't overflowing with info on VisualAge stuff. But I've been able to dig up a few references.

First, it seems it has been continued as the VAST Platform by Instantiations:
#^https://www.instantiations.com/vast-platform/

They have some docs on their website:
#^https://www.instantiations.com/vast-support/documentation/1301/#page/ug/vaug01.html

I also found a quite a bit by searching for VisualAge on the Internet Archive. Some of the more interesting ones I think are these:


These are, as you can see, for the C++ version, but the visual builder parts was similar. It was just more elegant with Smalltalk as you didn't need a compile cycle, and the language lends itself better to this type of dynamic coding.

Hope that helps.
InstantiationsVAST Platform – InstantiationsDesign it. Build it. Deploy it. Create object-oriented software that's stable, easy to maintain, and deploys smoothly — all from the same comprehensive development environment.

@harald Thanks, I'll look through them!