Unless you game for a living, you usually work a lot more than you game.

bmitc · on July 2, 2021

That’s true to a degree, but I think the discrepancy is still there. Experts in LabVIEW build up key commands to do things for them, and there’s even an ability to custom implement these using LabVIEW itself. Also, for some reason other fields seem to love these visual tools like TouchDesigner and Grasshopper. Programmers can be quite myopic when it comes to their programming preferences and perspectives.

For tools that require precise placing of wires like LabVIEW and vvvv, mouse strain and also the time it takes is indeed an issue. I am personally interested in sane but beautiful automatic layouts for visual languages, but this is most certainly a difficult problem. For example, if I could make an algorithm that basically makes LabVIEW (or a similar language) reorganize diagrams the way that I do, that would be great.

I think one inspiration are editing bays that professional video editors and also audio professional use. They have heavy use of software intermixed with hardware interfaces to perform their jobs.

jcelerier · on July 2, 2021

> Also, for some reason other fields seem to love these visual tools like TouchDesigner and Grasshopper.

It's very simple - if you work with artists and you make them a presentation of your software, and at any moment there is some amount of code displayed on the screen, some of them will get up and leave the presentation.

I worked on my software with someone who would literally refuse to use the keyboard - everything had to be done by mouse, and I know a fair amount of like-minded people in th e same field.

auxym · on July 2, 2021

> It's very simple - if you work with artists and you make them a presentation of your software, and at any moment there is some amount of code displayed on the screen, some of them will get up and leave the presentation.

Surprisingly, this is also the case for mechanical engineers. The proportion might be smaller, but they still exist. I know people in freshman classes that are retook the intro to programming class which was stuff like variables, conditionals and loops in Matlab.

Then there's people who did OK in their Fortran classes in the 1990s but never touched a line of cosey since.

The people have a good chance of being intimidated by code. This is where LabVIEW and Simulink come in.

swiftcoder · on July 2, 2021

That's probably true once once hits the workforce, but I'm pretty sure I gamed 40+ hours/week back in school. That starcraft ladder doesn't climb itself...