In order to be more useful I think a "graphical" programming system must
provide bi-directional translation to/from code.  Perhaps not from arbitrary
code (i.e. given some hand-written UI code it shouldn't be expected or
required to generate diagrams), but at least the machine-generated code
should be "translatable" back to diagrams.

Bob Jarvis
The Timken Company

> -----Original Message-----
> From:	Adam Bridge [SMTP:abridge at dcn.davis.ca.us]
> Sent:	Wednesday, January 27, 1999 2:15 PM
> To:	swart at home.com; squeak at cs.uiuc.edu
> Subject:	RE: Morphic, dataflow and encapsulation
> 
> My problem with graphical programming systems (and here I'm thinking about
> a few
> very different entities: Prograph is the extreme case, HyperCard and
> Interface
> Builder for Apple's Yellow Box are more typical ones) is their failure to
> produce documentation for what's there or they hide what's going on by
> requiring
> many different windows to be open. 
> 
> There's no documentation feature which allows someone to tell the
> application or
> its UI (whatever you're working on) to document itself -- so you end up
> hopping
> >from place to place, reference to reference, striving to maintain
> context.  I
> HATE this.  With a passion.  Even Smalltalk can be a pain with three or
> four
> browsers open at a time while I try to figure out just WHAT object is
> going to
> respond to a message that has been sent.  I must be too old or something.
> 
> One of the things that I liked best about the GUI Builder in
> SmalltalkAgents was
> that when it built a window it wrote the code for that window which I
> could then
> see and, if needed, edit.
> 
> In InterfaceBuilder (in Apple's Yellow Box) you build an interface and
> hook up
> the feature -- but then result is all concealed in a NIB file which is a
> black
> box -- there's no way to tell IB to write out in human-readable form what
> the
> contents of that NIB file are.
> 
> This inability to concisely document is, to me, the greatest weakness of
> graphical tools.
> 
> Thanks for listening -- pant pant pant....
> 
> 
> Adam Bridge
>