UI creation is best handled by a WYSIWYG editor, animations are nice to visualize on a timeline, and math formulas are clearest when written as is.
Picking the wrong model creates a mess. Try to express a sorting algorithm as a flowchart. It would be too difficult to follow. Yet a business process is great to model as a flowchart. A picture is only sometimes worth a thousand words.
Take a look at the papers published from VPRI, the research org founded by Alan Kay. They have built languages for graphics, parsing, stream processing--each optimized for its particular domain. They could have used a general purpose language but it would have resulted in much more code than necessary.
So the question everyone should be asking is: why hasn't a multi-paradigm programming environment taken off?
> UI creation best handled by a WYSIWYG editor, a business process is best modeled as a flowchart
I disagree with those two. UI creation has generally evolved away from WYSIWYG, composing a UI with code is a much better approach and is now nearly the universal way of doing it. For the business process, the flow chart only works as an extremely high level overview, the implementation is always done in something like code.
> Why is it a better approach? Universal does not always mean better. Javascript was built in 10 days and it's now universal.
Easier to diff, easier to copy paste, easier to upgrade and easier to extend. In the 90's we had both approaches and it was the code based (Qt, GTK) and declarative (html, xaml) systems that (mostly) won.
If I'm working with win32 or winforms then I love the UI designer, but that's because they come with an awful API, for anything else I'll take the code approach.
UI creation is best handled by a WYSIWYG editor, animations are nice to visualize on a timeline, and math formulas are clearest when written as is.
Picking the wrong model creates a mess. Try to express a sorting algorithm as a flowchart. It would be too difficult to follow. Yet a business process is great to model as a flowchart. A picture is only sometimes worth a thousand words.
Take a look at the papers published from VPRI, the research org founded by Alan Kay. They have built languages for graphics, parsing, stream processing--each optimized for its particular domain. They could have used a general purpose language but it would have resulted in much more code than necessary.
So the question everyone should be asking is: why hasn't a multi-paradigm programming environment taken off?