1. 🖼 !?!!
Visual Programming Languages vs. Ruby

2. EMILY
NAKASHIMA
@eanakashima

3. BY DAY, ENG
MANAGER @
HONEYCOMB.IO
By night, design & viz nerd!

5. != EXPERT

6. VISUAL PROGRAMMING
LANGUAGES!
(VPLS)

7. SCRATCH
via MIT Media Lab

8. - Amanda Wilson, David C. Moffat,
https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Screenshot-of-a-classic-Hello-World-program-in-Scratch_fig1_266490101

9. - mberry, wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scratch_(programming_language)#/media/File:Scratch_Hello_World.png

10. - max johnson
https://blog.penjee.com/scratch-2-0-in-4-easy-steps-animated-gif

11. - @paulsinnett
http://ludumdare.com/compo/2013/04/29/creating-a-physics-system-in-sratch
event handler "
variable "
loop with condition "

12. “This type of support is highly useful but,
computationally speaking, trivial compared to the
challenges ahead attempting to support users to
produce meaningful programs. The most daunting
challenge will be to support pragmatics, that is the
study of what code means in particular situation.
- Alexander Repenning
https://sgd.cs.colorado.edu/wiki/images/2/21/20YearsofBlockProgramingLessonsLearned_published.pdf

13. WHAT ARE THE HARD PARTS?
➤ Conditionals are hard to read
➤ Abstraction is hard & might require
inventing new visual grammar
➤ Code reuse is hard
➤ Hard to diff & merge
➤ Resource-intensive
➤ Type checking may be hard to visualize
➤ Doesn’t fit on-screen well
➤ Code comments are hard
➤ Your face can only absorb so many shapes

14. WHAT ABOUT RUBY?
What does its design optimize for?

15. SYNTAX!
Simple & easy to learn

16. # Ruby’s syntax is relatively forgiving & easy to learn:
Kernel.puts("potato")
Kernel.puts('potato')
Kernel.puts('potato',)
Kernel .puts('potato')
Kernel.puts 'potato'
puts 'potato'

17. Visual programming for IoT
From top left: Modkit, FlowHub, Node-RED

18. # Chef uses a ruby DSL
%w(public logs).each do |dir|
directory "#{node.app.web_dir}/#{dir}" do
owner node.user.name
mode "0755"
recursive true
end
end

19. CLASSES & OBJECTS
Ruby wants to make it *so* easy to make Classes & Objects

20. class Booplesnoot
def hop
puts "hoppity hop 🐰"
end
end
Booplesnoot.new.hop # prints hoppity hop 🐰

21. CLASSES & OBJECTS (SKETCHPAD – 1963)

22. CODE REUSE
Composition, inheritance, methods, and more

23. module mobility
def hop
puts "hoppity hop 🐻 | 🐰"
end
end
class DangerFloof
include mobility
end
class Booplesnoot
include mobility
end

24. CODE REUSE (CHIMERA)
Chimera

25. SO WHAT’S HARD IN RUBY?
???

26. SHOW STATE
What state is buried inside my app?

27. PYGMALION (1975)

28. SHOW THE WHOLE
How do the pieces of a program fit together?

29. SHOW THE WHOLE (FUSION 9)
Fusion 9

30. SHOW THE WHOLE (CUBE – 1995)

31. SO WHAT?
What can we learn from VPLs?

32. THANK YOU!
twitter.com/eanakashima for more hot takes ☄
https://bit.ly/2KVWfeA for references 📜