Paul Tarvydas  <tarvydas@allstream.net> wrote:
+---------------
| Adrian Kubala wrote:
| > Takuon Soho <Tak@somwhere.net> schrieb:
| >> For me, ultimate expression of that dream is to elucidate some sort of
| >> correspondence between geometrical shapes and abstract algorithm
| >> design and then have an environment which embodies it.
| > 
| > I think this is a pipe dream because the very things that make algorithm
| 
| I'll be glad to disagree :-).  
| 
| I and my colleagues have been doing this very thing for over a decade now. 
| We build embedded systems software by drawing "schematics" of the software
| and compiling the schematics to machine code (or VM code).
...
| We (the software community) took the wrong turn at Albuquerque.
| We need blueprints for software.  We need to be able to draw software.
+---------------

Indeed. Google for the programming language "Prograph", developed
in the early 1980's at McGill University, IIRC, and continued at
Dalhousie University by Tomasz Pietrzykowski, Michael Levin, and
others. [Hmmm.... <http://users.cs.dal.ca/~smedley/Research.html>
indicates that work in that field is still going on at Dalhousie.]
It was an almost fully functional, graphical, dataflow language
which one programmed by "wiring" sources, sinks, databases, and
processing boxes together, very much like drawing a schematic.
Pictorius, Inc.  of Halifax, Nova Scotia <www.pictorius.com> sold
a commercial version for the Mac. [The <http://www.pictorius.com/>
domain seems to be dead, but see <http://www.tritera.com/prograph.html>.]
Tha abstract at <http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=317169> has
additional description, wherein it is compared to Lisp & Prolog:

    ...[but] which overcomes some of the shortcomings of Lisp by
    replacing the usual textual representation of programs by
    pictures called "prographs".


-Rob

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