I need to get this out and out pretty quickly.
If blogging is a way of venting ones frustrations then so be it. I thought why would people be interested in my rants and deduced that they might like reading it if I act Stupid and Dumb.
From my experiences as a rickety software writer, I have come to believe that there exists a class of projects that lie at the border between the possible and the impossible.
No extra points for failing in a software project. But see my teachers were making it a point to force me to write the purpose I was writing a code for at the start of the program.
It used to be like:
"WAP to display the first n fibonacci numbers in the fibonacci series"
I never questioned them and being an obedient student followed every bit of instruction given.
Now no one writes code that does nothing and its presumed that people are into coding to do useful stuff.
But I never found anything interesting or useful in the series we generated.
Not that it mattered as long as we got those elusive extra marks.
Coming to the main topic of this post:
THE most stupid project I have ever laid my hands on that seemed to be at the border of the possible/impossible is VISUAL PROGRAMMING
My advice to people dreaming of such things is to stop doing that and get real.
I in fact gave a seminar on this topic in my post graduation. Literature was hard to come by. There were classifications of programming languages. But not visual programming languages.
I hybridized literature that spoke about Programming by Example with some obscure software called Pygmalion. I also looked at some radically new ways of representing program execution and data.
I spoke on recording user actions as done in macros. I spoke of showing program actions by animation and representing data as visual elements such as boxes.
Finally when it came to implementation It never came to fruition. Post graduation is where you get your ideas tested and the feedback that I got from Dr. Dobbs journal editor can be summarized in one word:
"Interesting"
Would like some comments if it helps clarify.. Don't know what use this technology, if I may call it that, might be put to use in. In light of recent developments in AR/VR and HMD may be its got some real uses in program debugging or tools to represent program visually so that programming errors become evident. It could also help in cases where programmer needs help to visualize complex data structures.
