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ivanreese / visual-programming-codex

Waypoints to the past and future of visual programming.
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Neil Gershenfeld's Fab Modules #14

Open antimatter15 opened 5 years ago

antimatter15 commented 5 years ago

Neil Gershenfeld of the MIT Media Lab's Center for Bits and Atoms (of which Matt Keeter, author of Antimony— the alphabetically first visual programming implementation, was a former student) has been developing a program "mods" for the past few years and using his students as guinea pigs. There isn't very much information available about it online, but it's quite interesting (especially because of its unique domain)

It's written in plain javascript with no external libraries (in part because of Neil's insistence on understanding everything from the bits onwards), and it's geared specifically towards workflows related to digital fabrication. A prototypical example of a program would be something that takes PNG images, generate traces, plan paths in 3D which can be visualized in 3D, and finally drives some heavy machinery according to that plan.

It's roughly a dataflow environment, but block have their own interactive elements and can use this capability to trigger a connected subgraph.

screenshot 2019-02-02 18 12 36
ivanreese commented 5 years ago

Interesting! I visited the page (based on the URL in your screenshot), and found the repo. This environment definitely feels like a research project, in that there doesn't seem to be guidance on how someone discovering the project should make use of it.

I'm not really sure how to incorporate this into the codex, since I don't really know how to learn what their goals are, the strengths of their approach, lessons they've learned through failed directions, or anything else that might serve as a giant shoulder to stand on.

Thoughts / suggestions?