joreg

It has it's advantages and disadvantages, same goes for text-programming though: Sometimes in text you store results in badly named variables because it is hard to make up a meaningful term for each step of a computation. In those cases visual code shines because instead of forcing you to come up with a name it allows you to directly connect things with the added benefit of visualizing dataflow, thus structuring your code. If you have an algorithm though where each interim result can be clearly named, then text code shines. So roughly we argue that the more high-level your code is, the better it works visually, the more low-level it is, the better it is expressed in text. And it is therefore about a combination of both worlds. We don't have this yet in vvvv gamma (but have it in vvvv beta) that you can at any point write text-code if you prefer and wrap this in a node for further use in your visual graph.

Most certainly not. What is it?

Right, like this it reads weird. It does not mean that we consider funded academic research "commercial", but that in addition to what is commonly understood as "commercial use of vvvv" we're also asking teams that have funding to support our research by buying licenses. We wanted to make a distinction to education, where vvvv is completely free to use.

We now have 2 products "vvvv beta" the one that we first released in 2002 and "vvvv gamma" which we just released. We need to get them both represented on vvvv.org eventually but for a start it was easier to create a second page.

Right, the most obvious difference is that vvvv is visual. Then comes the "live-programming" aspect which means that in vvvv you don't "edit-compile-fixcompiletimeerror-compile-run" but you always only run and modify the running program. Compilation happens in the background. If there is a compile-time error, vvvv points that out for you, but keeps running. runtime-errors also don't necessarily completely stop the program. So while in the end you can certainly achieve the same things with vvvv and processing, the way you do things is very different.

helo HN, joreg here, one of the devvvvs team of 5. After more than 7 years in R&D we've just released the second major release of our visual live programming environment vvvv, titled "vvvv gamma". It uses our language "VL" which compiles to C# using roslyn and it is using state hot-reload to allow you to modify programs while they are running.

It combines metaphors known from dataflow programming with others known from OOP and functional programming, but all visual. Still if you want you can extend it with C# code easily and even consume any .NET library from nuget.org directly without the need to write any plugin-wrapper boilerplate code.

From previous HN discussions we know you all have an opinion on visual programming, so please try vvvv, we hope it to be different to what you expect. It is free for non-commercial use without any restrictions, no registration required. Windows only for now.

Looking forward to your feedback and please let us know if this is something that could be useful for you!