Hest

The term Visual Programming is a bit of a misnomer. My preference is Graphical Programming, though it is hard to overcome cultural inertia. Oh, also, welcome to the show.

Why am I making Hest? Who is it for? When did I start? When will it end? What is it now? Where is it going? And what of this podcast?

Functions and data, conveyance, points and edges, and execution with a mandatory, explicit notion of time and space.

Grab the giant thumb, push it all the way to infinity at the top, or negative infinity at the bottom.

Fully explore the space of your designs, even if it makes you into an infamous grump. Also, I sometimes make up jargon like Graphical Programming, and today we have another: Participatory Execution. Finally, Wallace & Gromit have their long-awaited debut on the show.

Virtual edges and pocket dimensions might be key pieces of a workable approach to abstraction, something that Hest sorely lacks.

Data as player character. Continuity and intimacy. The well of video games. Putting your finger on the data and following it from birth to death. A patchwork quilt of understanding, versus a single continuous thread.

Hest owes more to SpaceChem than any other inspiration. It's a beautiful little gem of a game, released by Zachtronics back in 2011. SpaceChem challenges you to design, develop, and debug complex systems, with an interface that looks a bit like a node-and-wire visual programming language. But the feel of playing it is wholly unique, and worth reflecting on and drawing from.

Hest is a long way from finished — a long way from viable, even. It's still riddled with design issues. Let's take a look at one of the big ones: with the current design, there are no mechanisms for coordination. Introducing some of the most obvious coordination mechanisms would violate the spirit of Hest. How should that be fixed? Tune in next week!

Last episode, we looked at how the edges-conveying-points execution model leads to problems of synchronization. If you change some small part of your program so that it takes a little longer for data to traverse than it did before, then data leaving that small part will be behind schedule (so to speak) for wherever it needs to go next. Local changes cause non-local effects. This pr