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• Graphical Programming Language HackChat Transcript

  Shayna • 08/18/2017 at 18:02 • 0 comments

  Shulie Tornel Okay, let's get started!

  Shulie Tornel @Boian Mitov Can you start us off with a short bio about yourself

  Shulie Tornel and what you do and have created? :)

  Boian Mitov Sure...

  Boian Mitov I got hooked on electronics, when I was about 14 or so

  Boian Mitov It was back in Bulgaria where I was born

  Bossman I have some questions on visual programming in general

  Boian Mitov My father was mathematician, but he was also hooked on electronics, and used to do some cool projects at home

  Boian Mitov This got my attention, and I asked him to teach me

  Boian Mitov As a typical mathematician, he refused, and instead gave me a bunch of books to reed :-D

  Bossman more questions relating to your outlook and opinion as to what role you think visual programming will play in development: can it be used to augment learning of tradtional programming or will 'replace' traditional programming roles and put engineers into more complicated roles, etc.

  Shulie Tornel @Bossman Please add it to this sheet: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1L54ps__sTScIQqamefYh95n4K9Ldz0UBSbx4_miYEq0/edit#gid=0

  Boian Mitov I guess the idea was, if I survive through them I will never give up...

  Bossman What are your thoughts?

  Boian Mitov Well... it took the 3th book or so before I really found something interesting. It was a book called "Electonics- the modern hobby" ( Kind of resonates nowadays too :-D )

  Boian Mitov And this is how I got hooked

  Boian Mitov but lets go to the question

  Boian Mitov For the last 200 years, since the Charles Babbage mechanical computer, and Ada Lovelace, the computing hardware has made some considerable advances....

  Boian Mitov However we still program computers the same way as she did 200 years ago...

  Boian Mitov The modern computer architectures are quite different than the early days and traditional programming approaches do not map well in programming GPUs with thousands of micropores, and even less so when programming FPGA for computing unless we burn a virtual CPU in the FPGA, effectively negating its advantages

  Boian Mitov The problem is that traditional computer languages with few exceptions are designed for sequential execution. This is fine for a single CPU core, but completely inadequate for a parallel system, GPU, FPGA or a computing cluster

  Boian Mitov To be able to utilize this type of modern computing platform, we need to change the way we describe the problem and teh solution

  Boian Mitov instead of describing it as a sequence of operations, we should describe it as a flow of data, and processing performed on that data, and let the computer distribute the task of the execution, the way a compiler converts high level code to assembly

  Boian Mitov Added bonus to this approach is that it is quite easy to visualize

  Boian Mitov In addition it is much more intuitive. Lets think of a large organization versus a single person

  Boian Mitov A single person will write a list of things he/she needs to do to achieve something

  Boian Mitov when you have a large organization however this approach does not work any more

  Boian Mitov instead the organization creates a product/document etc. flow, and describes what each unit in the organization will perform over the product.

  Bossman Fantastic explanation. As someone that uses visual programming on other projects (web apps, mobile, etc.), the question many of us have is "what are we learning?" / "what skills are we really developing here that can be put to use at an organization outside of this project"

  Boian Mitov So now we have the 2 approaches. The sequence programming and the dataflow programming

  Boian Mitov @Bossman Thank you! :-)

  Boian Mitov @Bossman The short answer is that we learn "the future of programming" ;-)

  Shulie Tornel We have another question

  Boian Mitov Make no mistake. The switch to dataflow and graphical...

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