> There has been some slight work done towards visual development, where you create 'circuit-diagram software': wire up logical components with visual control flow (or visual data flow, perhaps). It never seems to catch on.
We've done this in the past. You can blame implementation, perhaps, but we've found that in our use case (3D graphics processing workflows), it starts to get too hard to understand what is occuring for any non-trivial "program", since you're bound by the constraints of how much information we decided to display visually, whereas with a general purpose ___domain-specific programming language you can choose how much information to surface, by being able to choose the level of abstraction you want (or not, as the case may be).
The reason we chose to go visually in the first place, is because someone has the bright idea that "anyone" should be able to create these workflows, but it ends up that a technically minded 3D graphics engineer does it anyway, and they just get frustrated by not being able to write a proper program/script :)
It strikes me that IC design systems started out oriented towards a 2d visualization scheme but have evolved towards a text representation. Chip design was once done by laying out components in a 2d plan view of the chip, but is now done in VHDL/RTL.
We've done this in the past. You can blame implementation, perhaps, but we've found that in our use case (3D graphics processing workflows), it starts to get too hard to understand what is occuring for any non-trivial "program", since you're bound by the constraints of how much information we decided to display visually, whereas with a general purpose ___domain-specific programming language you can choose how much information to surface, by being able to choose the level of abstraction you want (or not, as the case may be).
The reason we chose to go visually in the first place, is because someone has the bright idea that "anyone" should be able to create these workflows, but it ends up that a technically minded 3D graphics engineer does it anyway, and they just get frustrated by not being able to write a proper program/script :)