Re: Communications of ACM: Sir, Please Step Away from the ASR-33!

[Niklas Holsti <niklas.holsti@tidorum.invalid>]

Dmitry A. Kazakov wrote:
> On Mon, 27 Dec 2010 20:41:36 +0200, Niklas Holsti wrote:
> 
>> Such mixed 2D+text codes are already a reality for many programmers who 
>> use box-and-arrow diagrams with tools like LabView, Simulink, or any of 
>> the UML-based tools, combined with application-specific function-boxes 
>> written in some traditional textual language. These programmers may not 
>> even glance at the 1D-text source-code that the tools generate from the 
>> diagrams, much less attempt to understand the structure of this code.
> 
> In one project the customer was adamant that all code must be written in
> such a language (DiaDem, now owned NI. They also maintain LabView). He had
> an idea that diagrams were easy to understand, so that he could modify them
> by himself.
> 
> As expected this ended in a disaster. The project was a real-size one. I
> have no idea how many square meters the diagram was, but in the end we had
> no other choice than to write a program, which processed the textual
> descriptions of diagram. They were text files. So instead of editing square
> kilometers of arrows, imagine how would you browse for anything in such a
> thing! we patched these text files and let the tool add missing connections
> and necessary blocks. Nobody ever looked at the blocks and arrows. Just to
> load the mess to look at it took minutes.
> 
> Fortunately at some point the customer dropped the requirement and we
> gradually removed most of the mess. Now only 1% of code remains in DiaDem.

This is a good description of a failure of diagram-based programming, 
thanks Dmitry.

Nevertheless, there are also many examples of successful projects that 
use diagrams. Perhaps the DIAdem tool was not a good match for the 
application where it failed. The NI webpage http://www.ni.com/diadem/ 
describes DIAdem as a data-analysis tool, not a general programming tool.

> Ada has nothing to fear from this side.

I am not so sure. I remember attending an Ada conference (possibly 
Ada-Europe 2003) in which a speaker from Airbus appeared. I think he was 
expected to speak about how Ada was used at Airbus, and how good it was; 
instead, he told us that Airbus were moving to model-based development, 
using a synchronous modelling language, and that the hand-written Ada 
code was being replaced by automatically generated C code. I felt that 
this depressed the audience a good bit...

-- 
Niklas Holsti
Tidorum Ltd
niklas holsti tidorum fi
       .      @       .