I still think excel is the leader in this category. Was looking at a roadmap produced in excel the other day, somewhat amazed of what the persons working on it had been able to produce with various workarounds to get it to their liking. It still a rather blunt tool though. But is has the right elements in place, data grids, a workable visualization canvas, some limited automation capacity to tie them together.
I’m thinking the same elements presented in an environment perhaps more like Scratch could work. A kind of whiteboard metaphor where objects are independently scriptable, ad some data flow modeling and data source capacity to that and there could be something a bit less blunt
> I still think excel is the leader in this category.
Yes, definitely. The "reactive functional" programming paradigm of the spreadsheet is radically more understandable for end users than the imperative, as it doesn't require keeping a mental model of state changes in memory.
Fortunately, React has popularized this reactive functional paradigm and it is no longer confined to spreadsheets.
> I’m thinking the same elements presented in an environment perhaps more like Scratch could work
An approach of visual building blocks could help for learning, though Scratch is imperative so it has all the trappings that make a language hard to learn for non-programmers, plus all the inconveniences of editing a visual language (much more cumbersome than editing text).
I'd rather have a "structure editor"[1] for editing a textual language (like the spreadsheet, but with a tree representation instead of a grid one), which added enhanced visual representations over the base tree. You know, like the IDEs developers use, but with a functional reactive language that mixed code and data, like the spreadsheet does.
BTW, several people have created Javascript libraries that follow the simple design of Scratch primitives, so that those can be used within a textual environment.
Fair enough. I wasn’t thinking of the language actually, more of how they use the painting canvas. The fact that scripts belong to tangible things and not some abstract “background”. Compare VBA and formulas in excel. Formulas naturally belongs to their cells, which is simple, but vba exists in this ambient thing that requires an entirely different abstract model to grasp.
I’m thinking the same elements presented in an environment perhaps more like Scratch could work. A kind of whiteboard metaphor where objects are independently scriptable, ad some data flow modeling and data source capacity to that and there could be something a bit less blunt