Wiring programs together on a 2D canvas is nice when the problem being solved is amenable to it (signal processing, pipelines, etc.). But, a typical general purpose program would look like a breadboard from hell, no matter how hard one tries to organize nicely organize it.
The solution to certain types of programs not being suitable to write in it is just… don’t.
I did various bits of freelance work on VVVV projects a while ago. Often writing C++ or C# code to interface with VVVV. Even when I was mostly stuck in the guts of the C++ bit having a test rig in VVVV was a lovely way to interact with and test code.
As far as I remember it’s absolutely simplicity to create a node that contains custom C# code (double click it and an editor window pops up). I definitely remember doing that for bits of logic that seemed easier to express that way.
I saw people build very cool stuff in it back then. If you’re building interactive visuals the “always live” way of working seems to allow some pretty fast iteration. Definitely saw things built in it that maybe would have been better built in other ways, but that’s just natural when you have people highly skilled in one tool or language.
There are some domains where it’s really helpful to empower subject expert to develop their domain specific data flow, without them needing to learn the ins and outs of a language like c#.
See for example Grasshopper for parametric architecture, or the node system in Blender.
OFC maintainability of a spaghetti node system is borderline impossible so there are constraints and tradeoffs.
Accessibility to non-software engineer domain talent is the main attraction imho.
I don't really agree that visuals immediately makes things messier but I do wish these systems leveraged scoped areas a bit better to reduce pin visual noise.
That said, you just have to treat it like code and build up good patterns and styles to keep things tidy.
Spent a lot of time messing around with it a few years ago. The tutorials of Takuma Nakata are great and it's very powerful and versatile for creating cool experimental stuff.
Not sure what the big problem with licensing is? Feels like some people just want everything in this space to be free. 500 euro for a lifetime license seems pretty generous to me, it's basically a small fee if you use it for any kind of commercial application.
Relying on a commercial product means you don't have the source code, means you're dependent on where they move in the future, means you're screwed if they shut down.
That's the standard library. From a quick search, I get zero relevant matches on their account for "runtime", "compiler", "interpreter", or "editor".
Looking over https://thegraybook.vvvv.org/reference/extending/overview.ht... I see a few references to contributing to their libraries, but nothing about compiling the language core itself. And even then, their library distribution mechanism seems to be NuGet, with all of its binary-first warts.
With this software you'll typically create one-off installations, no maintenance necessary. I don't expect to get the source code for every tool I use in production.
In a perfect world, sure. But most of us, alas, have to live in the real world, where these are considered unreasonable expectations.
People need to get paid. That includes the developers who work on unusual niche products like this.
> it's lost afterwards
It's not lost. It just can't be repurposed, in the unlikely situation that VVVV just disappears completely. Which isn't really a problem for most projects in this space, which are often highly experimental and unique.
Ok, so enlighten me. How would this open-source everything world work?
How would companies protect their investments in research and proprietary technology? How will you guarantee security, besides depending on the nebulous "the community will fix it"?
Who's in charge of the direction development will take? How will you prevent fragmentation in different branches?
What creates a drive for innovation if you take out competition? How will you enforce quality control?
No need for personal attacks. I am not trying to sell anything and have literally 0 vested interest in VVVV. It's unfair to label it "garbage" though.
Your argument that companies are holding their clients "hostage" by not sharing their source code indicates that we fundamentally disagree over one of the core systems that makes an economy work.
By your logic, everyone producing anything should reveal exactly how they do it. Even in a totally open source world we would not do this. Some methods are dangerous in the wrong hands.
> SolarWinds? LastPass? Microsoft?
Naming a few high profile security blunders does not negate the far greater consequences that open sourcing all code would have.
> You are, for your branch.
Ain't nobody got time for that. I just want to use software, not maintain it. I pay others to do that for me.
> It's that "competition" thing you claim to love so much.
Fragmentation does not automatically lead to competition. I would argue it actually makes a product weaker, because attentions are divided and it would have to compete with more consolidated efforts.
> unexamined priors ... pure nonsense
So no real counterargument here.
> don't merge patches
No time for that.
> grants and crowdfunding
These usually rely on the expectation of future profits or a unique product that delivers value. Sure, it would be wonderful if all software was supported by altruistic contributors, but again: most of us have to deal with that pesky reality I mentioned earlier.
> What creates a drive for innovation if you take out competition?
Closed-source is _protectionism,_ not competitive.
_Open-source_ is the ultimate expression of competitiveness… because you are competing against anyone who could bring out an identical product copied directly from your own, with only minor changes.
This is an opinion, not a fact. Many closed-source companies invest heavily in research and development to create innovative solutions, which definitely does drive competition in the market. Differentiation through unique features can enhance a competitive advantage.
Free for nonprofits/hobbyists and €500 as soon as you use a piece of software commercially would be very reasonable. But charging the same from someone who doesn’t make a penny as from a company making millions doesn’t make much sense.
If the offering brings any value at all to development of a a commercial offering then 500 € is very reasonable.
The point is it needs to improve something in your development flow that’s not available elsewhere, in terms of feature velocity, availability of talent, etc, not just curiosity.
QT, Unity etc have price points in this zone and if I remember correctly are higher.
Have you actually seen VVVV? It's nothing like QT or Unity. It's a visual scripting tool, that does not require any real programming knowledge (although it definitely helps if you have some).
One of our animators can't write code, but he made some interesting sketches with it. The program is very experimental in nature.
Written language and mathematics have been around for thousands of years; Why must there must be better way than text to make a program? It's how humans communicate. It's how you're reading this right now. This comment wouldn't be better as a picture or as a YouTube video.
In all my experience with visual programming over several decades has been awful and it's because it's the wrong medium for complex ideas.
It’s about abstractions, and a lot of the time visual programming tools don’t get it right. Either they are too abstract and your limited to a set of nodes/blocks that are not powerful enough and adding more is challenging because the abstraction is so high there’s lots of overhead to get there, or the abstraction capabilities are too low and the ability to encapsulate and extend visually programmed code for reuse in other places or larger projects is hampered by the design.
About the only “general purpose” visual programming language I’ve ever come across that is genuinely trying to be able to do all of it, is DRAKON https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/DRAKON
And even then, complexity can be a challenge because depending on how the software is architected the diagrams get unwieldy to read as more logic lives on a single layer… DRAKON does have a pair of little tricks that makes it a bit less confusing to work with than a lot of node based programming tools. The first is that lines cannot cross so you avoid the tangled knot diagram issue, the logical flow is relatively clear from your entry points to your exit or loop back to start. The second is that it serves as an abstraction to other programming languages, allowing for use of traditional tools and techniques to debug and analyse the output programs if needed, and then once you’ve identified the problem you can make changes to the diagram, export and then compile the program again after confirm your diagram changes had the desired results in the intermediate format.
And before anyone asks what’s the point why not just program in the target language? First I’d like to point out that TypeScript is a thing, and then second I’d like to highlight that it was designed to aid in the comprehension and maintenance of algorithms in the aerospace software world, it’s meant to allow you to look at a diagram see the data flow and logical code paths and visually check that you haven’t forgotten things, heck you could confirm you had covered all your necessary conditions with some coloured pencils on a printout… which might feel foolish in an era of automated checking tools which we have today, but this was developed in the the Soviet Union in 1986 as part of the Buran space program, it solved their genuine needs for how to make checking code for correctness easier for humans, and has stuck around because even with automation it’s one of the few visual programming languages that managed to strike the balance between going to high level or giving too few tools for abstraction.
Nothing is perfect of course, it has issues, like every programming language does, but it’s been a useful little tool from time to time when I needed to collaborate on fiddly algorithms with non-programming experts who understood what the software needed to be doing way better than I did, and I understood way better how to make the software do it than they did. I’d encourage anyone who ever gave visual programming a shot to check it out even just for the sake of curiosity, and possibly learning a useful new flowchart diagramming standard even if you never use the compiler.
Why? I saw the diagrams in homepage and reasoned the code will occupy a fraction of the real estate, not to mention advantages of version control, copy paste etc. AST walking programs can turn code like `a = slider(min=0, max=10)` into a widget or visualize control flow.
This looks very good. I shyed away from geometry nodes because i have no patience to learn all the 3d stuff and it seems a bit limited for use with custom code and houdini is far too complex. This seems like a good middleground..
The licensing seems.. atrocious (both the wording and pricing), maybe I'm too far disconnected from the space where such applications are used but. I'm unsure which industry would tolerate this.
Sigh, another cool looking project where a programmer who knows nothing about licensing wrote their own license, and made their project unusable by anyone.
Good lawyers aren't automatically good programmers, and good programmers aren't automatically good lawyers.
There is a reason why the Open Source community has standardized around a small set of licenses, and a reason why most attempts at writing new licenses end up in sadness.
vvvv has been around for at least a decade (I recall looking at it when I was studying a digital arts degree in ‘09) so I doubt this is a problem in practice.
Indeed, I am confused what's so bad about this license?
Commercial use requires buying a license, and free for non-commercial uses. The website isn't using some bait and switch pseudo open-source tactics too, it's pretty clear that the product is proprietary.
I would like a point for point critique as well, not all of us are experts in legal and commercial aspects of licensing.
I’m embarrassed to admit my own working model is really limited as I’ve only worked in orgs where license issues were always somebody elses problem. I.e. somebody mandates which licenses can be used, and if there is a commercial offering you need to use, somebody else negotiates the terms and pricing.
Basically, a classic case of trying to use the opensource monika for marketing purposes, whilst trying to retain the ability to make money off the popularity when/if it does happen.
That's why if an "opensource" software does not use one of the standard OSS approved licenses, it is just shareware by another name.
Wiring programs together on a 2D canvas is nice when the problem being solved is amenable to it (signal processing, pipelines, etc.). But, a typical general purpose program would look like a breadboard from hell, no matter how hard one tries to organize nicely organize it.
The solution to certain types of programs not being suitable to write in it is just… don’t.
I did various bits of freelance work on VVVV projects a while ago. Often writing C++ or C# code to interface with VVVV. Even when I was mostly stuck in the guts of the C++ bit having a test rig in VVVV was a lovely way to interact with and test code.
As far as I remember it’s absolutely simplicity to create a node that contains custom C# code (double click it and an editor window pops up). I definitely remember doing that for bits of logic that seemed easier to express that way.
I saw people build very cool stuff in it back then. If you’re building interactive visuals the “always live” way of working seems to allow some pretty fast iteration. Definitely saw things built in it that maybe would have been better built in other ways, but that’s just natural when you have people highly skilled in one tool or language.
There are some domains where it’s really helpful to empower subject expert to develop their domain specific data flow, without them needing to learn the ins and outs of a language like c#.
See for example Grasshopper for parametric architecture, or the node system in Blender.
OFC maintainability of a spaghetti node system is borderline impossible so there are constraints and tradeoffs.
Accessibility to non-software engineer domain talent is the main attraction imho.
I don't really agree that visuals immediately makes things messier but I do wish these systems leveraged scoped areas a bit better to reduce pin visual noise.
That said, you just have to treat it like code and build up good patterns and styles to keep things tidy.
Spent a lot of time messing around with it a few years ago. The tutorials of Takuma Nakata are great and it's very powerful and versatile for creating cool experimental stuff.
Not sure what the big problem with licensing is? Feels like some people just want everything in this space to be free. 500 euro for a lifetime license seems pretty generous to me, it's basically a small fee if you use it for any kind of commercial application.
Relying on a commercial product means you don't have the source code, means you're dependent on where they move in the future, means you're screwed if they shut down.
That isn't true at all. Many commercial products are source code available including this one https://github.com/vvvv/VL.StandardLibs
That's the standard library. From a quick search, I get zero relevant matches on their account for "runtime", "compiler", "interpreter", or "editor".
Looking over https://thegraybook.vvvv.org/reference/extending/overview.ht... I see a few references to contributing to their libraries, but nothing about compiling the language core itself. And even then, their library distribution mechanism seems to be NuGet, with all of its binary-first warts.
There's also a huge difference between "you have the source code" and "you're legally allowed to use it".
With this software you'll typically create one-off installations, no maintenance necessary. I don't expect to get the source code for every tool I use in production.
> I don't expect to get the source code for every tool I use in production.
You should.
> With this software you'll typically create one-off installations, no maintenance necessary.
And then just accept that it's lost afterwards? No thanks.
> You should.
In a perfect world, sure. But most of us, alas, have to live in the real world, where these are considered unreasonable expectations.
People need to get paid. That includes the developers who work on unusual niche products like this.
> it's lost afterwards
It's not lost. It just can't be repurposed, in the unlikely situation that VVVV just disappears completely. Which isn't really a problem for most projects in this space, which are often highly experimental and unique.
> But most of us, alas, have to live in the real world, where these are considered unreasonable expectations.
Only because they're enabled by people like you.
Ok, so enlighten me. How would this open-source everything world work?
How would companies protect their investments in research and proprietary technology? How will you guarantee security, besides depending on the nebulous "the community will fix it"?
Who's in charge of the direction development will take? How will you prevent fragmentation in different branches?
What creates a drive for innovation if you take out competition? How will you enforce quality control?
And, most of all, how will developers make money?
> Ok, so enlighten me. How would this open-source everything world work?
You're the one trying to sell this garbage.
> How would companies protect their investments in research and proprietary technology?
Should they be able to hold their users hostage like that?
> How will you guarantee security, besides depending on the nebulous "the community will fix it"?
Haha. Hahahaha. Remember SolarWinds? LastPass? Microsoft?
> Who's in charge of the direction development will take?
You are, for your branch.
You don't have to merge every patch sent your way. You don't have to merge any patch sent your way!
> How will you prevent fragmentation in different branches?
You don't. It's that "competition" thing you claim to love so much.
> What creates a drive for innovation if you take out competition?
There are so many unexamined priors that this sentence takes for granted that it's not even wrong, and crosses into pure nonsense.
> How will you enforce quality control?
You… don't merge patches that don't meet your requirements…?
> And, most of all, how will developers make money?
Ideally, grants and crowdfunding are pretty much the VC model without the middlemen trying to get rich(er).
No need for personal attacks. I am not trying to sell anything and have literally 0 vested interest in VVVV. It's unfair to label it "garbage" though.
Your argument that companies are holding their clients "hostage" by not sharing their source code indicates that we fundamentally disagree over one of the core systems that makes an economy work.
By your logic, everyone producing anything should reveal exactly how they do it. Even in a totally open source world we would not do this. Some methods are dangerous in the wrong hands.
> SolarWinds? LastPass? Microsoft?
Naming a few high profile security blunders does not negate the far greater consequences that open sourcing all code would have.
> You are, for your branch.
Ain't nobody got time for that. I just want to use software, not maintain it. I pay others to do that for me.
> It's that "competition" thing you claim to love so much.
Fragmentation does not automatically lead to competition. I would argue it actually makes a product weaker, because attentions are divided and it would have to compete with more consolidated efforts.
> unexamined priors ... pure nonsense
So no real counterargument here.
> don't merge patches
No time for that.
> grants and crowdfunding
These usually rely on the expectation of future profits or a unique product that delivers value. Sure, it would be wonderful if all software was supported by altruistic contributors, but again: most of us have to deal with that pesky reality I mentioned earlier.
> What creates a drive for innovation if you take out competition?
Closed-source is _protectionism,_ not competitive.
_Open-source_ is the ultimate expression of competitiveness… because you are competing against anyone who could bring out an identical product copied directly from your own, with only minor changes.
Against Intellectual Monopoly: http://dklevine.com/general/intellectual/againstfinal.htm
This is an opinion, not a fact. Many closed-source companies invest heavily in research and development to create innovative solutions, which definitely does drive competition in the market. Differentiation through unique features can enhance a competitive advantage.
Free for nonprofits/hobbyists and €500 as soon as you use a piece of software commercially would be very reasonable. But charging the same from someone who doesn’t make a penny as from a company making millions doesn’t make much sense.
Someone who doesn't make a penny, like a... Nonprofit?
Or a hobbyist
The hobbyist or non-profit CAN use it for free. Until they make a profit, at which point they'll need to pay.
Profit usually involves a lot more than a measly €500 (or €762 for gamma) for projects using tools like this.
VVVV even offers weekly/monthly subscriptions if you want it cheaper.
That's vvvv beta, the recent version is gamma.
Scroll down further.
Ah, I see, it's a bit more for Gamma. Still, 540 + 222 for a year on an individual license won't scare off clients that go for this type of projects.
Are all the cool libraries ported over yet?
If the offering brings any value at all to development of a a commercial offering then 500 € is very reasonable.
The point is it needs to improve something in your development flow that’s not available elsewhere, in terms of feature velocity, availability of talent, etc, not just curiosity.
QT, Unity etc have price points in this zone and if I remember correctly are higher.
Have you actually seen VVVV? It's nothing like QT or Unity. It's a visual scripting tool, that does not require any real programming knowledge (although it definitely helps if you have some).
One of our animators can't write code, but he made some interesting sketches with it. The program is very experimental in nature.
I desperately want visual programming to succeed.
There must be a better way than text to make a program.
Written language and mathematics have been around for thousands of years; Why must there must be better way than text to make a program? It's how humans communicate. It's how you're reading this right now. This comment wouldn't be better as a picture or as a YouTube video.
In all my experience with visual programming over several decades has been awful and it's because it's the wrong medium for complex ideas.
It’s about abstractions, and a lot of the time visual programming tools don’t get it right. Either they are too abstract and your limited to a set of nodes/blocks that are not powerful enough and adding more is challenging because the abstraction is so high there’s lots of overhead to get there, or the abstraction capabilities are too low and the ability to encapsulate and extend visually programmed code for reuse in other places or larger projects is hampered by the design.
About the only “general purpose” visual programming language I’ve ever come across that is genuinely trying to be able to do all of it, is DRAKON https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/DRAKON
And even then, complexity can be a challenge because depending on how the software is architected the diagrams get unwieldy to read as more logic lives on a single layer… DRAKON does have a pair of little tricks that makes it a bit less confusing to work with than a lot of node based programming tools. The first is that lines cannot cross so you avoid the tangled knot diagram issue, the logical flow is relatively clear from your entry points to your exit or loop back to start. The second is that it serves as an abstraction to other programming languages, allowing for use of traditional tools and techniques to debug and analyse the output programs if needed, and then once you’ve identified the problem you can make changes to the diagram, export and then compile the program again after confirm your diagram changes had the desired results in the intermediate format.
And before anyone asks what’s the point why not just program in the target language? First I’d like to point out that TypeScript is a thing, and then second I’d like to highlight that it was designed to aid in the comprehension and maintenance of algorithms in the aerospace software world, it’s meant to allow you to look at a diagram see the data flow and logical code paths and visually check that you haven’t forgotten things, heck you could confirm you had covered all your necessary conditions with some coloured pencils on a printout… which might feel foolish in an era of automated checking tools which we have today, but this was developed in the the Soviet Union in 1986 as part of the Buran space program, it solved their genuine needs for how to make checking code for correctness easier for humans, and has stuck around because even with automation it’s one of the few visual programming languages that managed to strike the balance between going to high level or giving too few tools for abstraction.
Nothing is perfect of course, it has issues, like every programming language does, but it’s been a useful little tool from time to time when I needed to collaborate on fiddly algorithms with non-programming experts who understood what the software needed to be doing way better than I did, and I understood way better how to make the software do it than they did. I’d encourage anyone who ever gave visual programming a shot to check it out even just for the sake of curiosity, and possibly learning a useful new flowchart diagramming standard even if you never use the compiler.
Why? I saw the diagrams in homepage and reasoned the code will occupy a fraction of the real estate, not to mention advantages of version control, copy paste etc. AST walking programs can turn code like `a = slider(min=0, max=10)` into a widget or visualize control flow.
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/49540847/interactive-sli...
I don't think it'll overtake text but it's alive and well all over the place and especially in the game industry.
It will! There is! Just hang on a moment : )
Not to be confused with VVVVVV https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VVVVVV
Previously, there was a list of repeating (2 through 6 inclusive) v projects: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11842351
Seems to be an iteration of https://vvvv.org/
It's the same. I can't remember why they have two websites.
Here's some earlier HN coverage and discussion of the same topic.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39469274
This looks very good. I shyed away from geometry nodes because i have no patience to learn all the 3d stuff and it seems a bit limited for use with custom code and houdini is far too complex. This seems like a good middleground..
i remember using it in early 2002 (due to this sticky name). wow, never expected to see this little masterpiece again
to keep talking about the licence, I don't get a licence for a week at 200$
I prefer cables.gl
The licensing seems.. atrocious (both the wording and pricing), maybe I'm too far disconnected from the space where such applications are used but. I'm unsure which industry would tolerate this.
oh does this work for Lunyx
Sigh, another cool looking project where a programmer who knows nothing about licensing wrote their own license, and made their project unusable by anyone.
Good lawyers aren't automatically good programmers, and good programmers aren't automatically good lawyers.
There is a reason why the Open Source community has standardized around a small set of licenses, and a reason why most attempts at writing new licenses end up in sadness.
vvvv has been around for at least a decade (I recall looking at it when I was studying a digital arts degree in ‘09) so I doubt this is a problem in practice.
> vvvv has been around for at least a decade
25 years
Whelp, that’s definitely at least a decade.
What's unusual about a proprietary product which has a non commercial use carve out? That's pretty standard isn't it?
Indeed, I am confused what's so bad about this license?
Commercial use requires buying a license, and free for non-commercial uses. The website isn't using some bait and switch pseudo open-source tactics too, it's pretty clear that the product is proprietary.
And it says "pattern pending", probably should have been "patent pending". But the same text has been there since 2020, so maybe it's intentional.
https://web.archive.org/web/20200401215651/https://visualpro...
According to whatever “TRUST” is, the seem pretty keen on their own rules.
What if they don’t want anything else enforced by an existing license?
Wanting something, and writing a license that delivers what you want are two different things.
They may know what they want, but that doesn't mean they know how to write a license that delivers what they want.
"Do what I mean, not what I say" is not effective in either code or contracts.
> There is a reason why the Open Source community has standardized around a small set of licenses,
What are you talking about? vvvv is proprietary software (and has been for about 25 years)
Can you explain what exactly about this license makes it unusable?
I would like a point for point critique as well, not all of us are experts in legal and commercial aspects of licensing.
I’m embarrassed to admit my own working model is really limited as I’ve only worked in orgs where license issues were always somebody elses problem. I.e. somebody mandates which licenses can be used, and if there is a commercial offering you need to use, somebody else negotiates the terms and pricing.
I can't even find the text of their license anywhere.
"vvvv can be used freely without any limitations for the following purposes:
Evaluation
Non-commercial use
FOSS development
Contribution development
Teaching and learning vvvv"
For all other cases you go to https://store.vvvv.org/ .
Basically, a classic case of trying to use the opensource monika for marketing purposes, whilst trying to retain the ability to make money off the popularity when/if it does happen.
That's why if an "opensource" software does not use one of the standard OSS approved licenses, it is just shareware by another name.
> Basically, a classic case of trying to use the opensource monika for marketing purposes,
vvvv does not claim anywhere to be open source.
> whilst trying to retain the ability to make money off the popularity when/if it does happen.
vvvv has been around for about 25 years. I would suggest to do a bit more research before jumping to conclusions.
BTW, they do open source quite a few components under proper OSS licenses: https://github.com/vvvv
They've been doing this since the late nineties or so. I think they consider their licensing model proven to work for them by now.
Just fyi, the word is moniker, not monika.
I keep making that same error =D
The same erra