Visual programming language

In computing, a visual programming language (VPL) is any programming language that lets users create programs by manipulating program elements graphically rather than by specifying them textually.[1][2] A VPL allows programming with visual expressions, spatial arrangements of text and graphic symbols, used either as elements of syntax or secondary notation. For example, many VPLs (known as dataflow or diagrammatic programming)[3] are based on the idea of "boxes and arrows", where boxes or other screen objects are treated as entities, connected by arrows, lines or arcs which represent relations.

An implementation of a "Hello, world!" program in the Scratch programming language making the "Cat" sprite "say" the text "Hello World!"
Not to be confused with Design language.

Definition

VPLs may be further classified, according to the type and extent of visual expression used, into icon-based languages, form-based languages, and diagram languages. Visual programming environments provide graphical or iconic elements which can be manipulated by users in an interactive way according to some specific spatial grammar for program construction.

The general goal of VPLs is to make programming more accessible to novices and to support programmers at three different levels[4]

  • Syntax: VPLs use icons/blocks, forms and diagrams trying to reduce or even to completely eliminate the potential of syntactic errors helping with the arrangement of programming primitives to create well-formed programs. Non VPLs examples are spell check in word processors underlining or even auto correcting individual words or grammar.
  • Semantics: VPLs may provide some mechanisms to disclose the meaning of programming primitives. This could include help functions providing documentation functions built-in to programming languages.
  • Pragmatics: VPLs support the study of what programs mean in particular situations. This level of support allows users to put artifacts created with a VPL into a certain state in order to explore how the program will react to that state. Examples: In AgentSheets or AgentCubes users can set games or simulations into a particular state in order to see how program would react. With the Thymio programming language users can bring a robot into a certain state in order to see how it will react, i.e., which sensors will be activated.

A visually transformed language is a non-visual language with a superimposed visual representation. Naturally visual languages have an inherent visual expression for which there is no obvious textual equivalent.

Current developments try to integrate the visual programming approach with dataflow programming languages to either have immediate access to the program state, resulting in online debugging, or automatic program generation and documentation. Dataflow languages also allow automatic parallelization, which is likely to become one of the greatest programming challenges of the future.[5]

The Visual Basic, Visual C#, Visual J# etc. languages of the Microsoft Visual Studio IDE are not visual programming languages: the representation of algorithms etc. is textual even though the IDE embellishes the editing and debugging activities with a rich user interface. A similar consideration applies to most other rapid application development environments which typically support a form designer and sometimes also have graphical tools to illustrate (but not define) control flow and data dependencies.

Parsers for visual programming languages can be implemented using graph grammars.[6][7]

List of visual languages
This is a dynamic list and may never be able to satisfy particular standards for completeness. You can help by adding missing items with reliable sources.

The following contains a list of notable visual programming languages.

Educational

Multimedia

Video games
  • Babylon.js has a node material editor that can be used to build shaders, procedural textures, particle systems and post processing effects.[15]
  • Blender Game Engine (Graphical logic editor)
  • Construct 2 is an HTML5-based 2D game editor, developed by Scirra Ltd.
  • CryEngine has a node-based visual programming language called FlowGraph.
  • GameMaker Studio, has a drag and drop game creation system developed by YoYo Games.
  • GameSalad is a visual game creation tool developed by GameSalad, Inc.
  • GDevelop is a visual game creation tool created by Florian Rival (4ian).
  • Godot, in-house open source MIT Licensed game development software.
  • Human Resource Machine is a visual programming-based puzzle game developed by Tomorrow Corporation.
  • Kodu, a software designed to program games with a 3D Interface developed by Microsoft Research.
  • Pixel Game Maker MV is an interface-based 2D video game development tool.
  • Rec Room includes a game creation system with a node-based visual programming language called Circuits.
  • Snowdrop has a visual scripting system.
  • Stencyl, a video game creation tool.
  • Unity has a visual scripting system as of the ECS release.
  • Unreal Engine 4 has a node-based visual programming language called Blueprints, and also shaders.

Many modern video games make use of behavior trees, which are in principle a family of simple programming languages designed to model behaviors for non-player characters. The behaviors are modeled as trees, and are often edited in graphical editors.

Systems / simulation

Automation

Data warehousing / business intelligence

Miscellaneous
  • Kwikpoint, an isotype visual translator created by Alan Stillman
  • Lava, an experimental object oriented RAD language
  • Limnor, a general purpose programming system. Limnor Studio is an IDE for rapid software development.
  • Morphic (software), makes it easier to build and edit graphical objects by direct manipulation and from within programs; the whole Self (programming language) programming environment is built using Morphic
  • Piet, an esoteric language, the program is an image whose pixels are the language's elements
  • PWCT, Free open source visual programming language for software development
  • StreamBase Systems, StreamBase EventFlow is a visual programming language for processing streaming events
  • WebML, is a visual language for designing complex data-intensive Web applications that can be automatically generated
  • Yahoo! Pipes is a visual data-flow programming system to process web data[18]
  • YAWL, graphical workflow language

Legacy

Visual styles

See also

References
  1. Jost, Beate; Ketterl, Markus; Budde, Reinhard; Leimbach, Thorsten (2014). "Graphical Programming Environments for Educational Robots: Open Roberta - Yet Another One?". 2014 IEEE International Symposium on Multimedia. pp. 381–386. doi:10.1109/ISM.2014.24. ISBN 978-1-4799-4311-1.
  2. The Maturity of Visual Programming
  3. Bragg, S.D.; Driskill, C.G. (1994). "Diagrammatic-graphical programming languages and DoD-STD-2167A". Proceedings of AUTOTESTCON '94. pp. 211–220. doi:10.1109/AUTEST.1994.381508. ISBN 0-7803-1910-9.
  4. Repenning, Alexander (2017). "Moving Beyond Syntax: Lessons from 20 Years of Blocks Programing in AgentSheets". Journal of Visual Languages and Sentient Systems. 3: 68–91. doi:10.18293/vlss2017-010.
  5. Johnston, W.M.; Hanna, J.R.P.; Millar, R.J. (2004). "Advances in dataflow programming languages" (PDF). ACM Computing Surveys. 36 (1): 1–34. doi:10.1145/1013208.1013209. Retrieved 2011-02-16.
  6. Rekers, J.; Schürr, A. (1997). "Defining and parsing visual languages with layered graph grammars". Journal of Visual Languages & Computing. 8 (1): 27–55. doi:10.1006/jvlc.1996.0027.
  7. Zhang, D.-Q. (2001). "A context-sensitive graph grammar formalism for the specification of visual languages". The Computer Journal. 44 (3): 186–200. doi:10.1093/comjnl/44.3.186.
  8. http://www.computermusicjournal.org/reviews/31-* * * 2/regan-bidule.html
  9. "Shader Editor — Blender Manual". docs.blender.org. Retrieved 2021-01-22.
  10. "Compositing — Blender Manual". docs.blender.org. Retrieved 2021-01-22.
  11. "Texture Editing — Blender Manual". docs.blender.org. Retrieved 2021-01-22.
  12. "Reference/Release Notes/2.92/Geometry Nodes - Blender Developer Wiki". wiki.blender.org. Retrieved 2021-01-22.
  13. "⚓ T67088 Everything Nodes UX". developer.blender.org. Retrieved 2021-01-22.
  14. Foundation, Blender. "Everything Nodes and the Scattered Stone". Blender Developers Blog. Retrieved 2021-01-22.
  15. "Babylon.js Node Material Editor". nme.babylonjs.com. Retrieved 2021-01-22.
  16. Construct Classic home page
  17. Construct Classic page on SourceForge
  18. "Yahoo! pipes". Archived from the original on 2015-01-03. Retrieved 2015-01-03.
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