Talk:Prograph

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I have it on good authority (a former employee) that TGS (The Gunakara Sun) Systems was actually the first company and Prograph International the second. I haven't been able to confirm the dates yet, however.

At http://www.cs.dal.ca/~smedley/veu/particpants/cox.html, Phil Cox states that he and Tomasz Pietrzykowski co-founded Prograph International in 1985 "to commercialise the Prograph language."

The confusion grows....

You're right. I did some googling and it seems the TGS name was around at least as early as 1989. I'll update shortly. Maury 12:49, 1 Dec 2004 (UTC)

The Gunakara Sun Systems was founded by Tomasz Pietrzykowski as a consulting company in the early 1980's, while he was at Acadia University. This company took up commercialization of Prograph after he moved to Halifax and the Technical University of Nova Scotia. It was later renamed to TGS Systems, and then to Prograph International. On going bankrupt in January 1995, its assets were purchased (for $1) by Pictorius. -- Mark Szpakowski, former Prograph UI and language (OOP) designer and product manager. --szpak 18:21, 20 August 2005 (UTC)

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Cheers to the person in Canada (eastlink.ca) who has improved the corporate history section! (Do I know you?) A former member of the "Pictorian Guard", I assume.... --RJCraig 04:05, 18 August 2005 (UTC)

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RE "Finally, Prograph included no simple way to gather up several operations into a single 'black box', without turning it into a method of its own." This is incorrect: as the screen shot of the Opers menu shows, there is an "Opers to Local" menu item, which turns a selected group of operations into a single icon. You then have the option to turn that into a method if useful to do so. --szpak 18:21, 20 August 2005 (UTC)

Mark, I agree that the original is misleading; is it possibly a result of a confusion in terminology, since Locals were Local Methods? --RJCraig 23:36, 22 August 2005 (UTC)

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Please create an account and sign in or at least indicate your identity in some way when editing the main article. It is the minimum in good wiki etiquette, after all. --RJCraig 03:24, 2 November 2005 (UTC)

Re some of the recent edits: Is "undercapitalization" a new euphemism? --RJCraig 03:29, 2 November 2005 (UTC)

Critique

Regarding the critique of the language:

• The choice of icons which are not mnemonically associative with everyday entities was chosen purposefully, based on the fact that what is a mnemonic differs from person to person, circumstance to circumstance, and culture to culture. In the end, they elected to go with icons which were simple and distinctive, under the assumption that, after the programmer became familiar with the language, they would be indicative of the events they represented. (As a person who is only passingly familiar with Prograph, I have no trouble in recognising the meaning of the various visual entities, with the exception of the occasional semantically inverted stop condition---a big 'X' indicating 'keep going', or vice-versa).

Comment - I agree with most of these criticisms of the Critique part of the article. The Prograph icons do have a certain mnemonic semantics: get is indented, set is outdented, for example. In any case obscurity of the icons was never singled out by Prograph users, or those checking it out, as an issue, to my knowledge. In fact Progaph's user interface was heralded as one of the reasons for its winning a MacUser Eddy award for best programming language. There were other factors that contributed to its eventual lack of success. --szpak

• Comments can be tied to leads, and propagated into/out of procedures using the 'propagate comments' tool---which I admit is still a bit clumsy.

• The non-routable wiring was, again, a design choice; contrast LabVIEW, in which the wiring is rectilinearly routable, and programmers spend a significant portion of their time maintaining the routing to adjust to changes in program code. Also, Prograph tries to encourage the coder to use locals to break portions of code off into subsections.

• I have found that visual and textual programming languages simply have a different set of easily expressed concepts; for example, Prograph's quicksort implementation is extremely elegant; on the other hand, bubblesort is quite difficult to write. I don't think it's fair to make a 'messiness' judgment of this nature without considering a wide variety of different kinds of algorithm.

• Paragraph three is simply not true; the 'local' subgroup is not a separate method, it is in fact precisely a 'black box' routine that is eliminated at compile-time.

• Any program needs to be broken into pieces in order to promote a reasonable level of visibility; in visual languages, this will often take the form of windows. I don't think it's fair to contrast this negatively with textual languages, which typically require that programs be segmented into textual subprocedures and separate files, which are every bit as difficult to view in parallel as Prograph locals/methods (i.e. using windows placed beside each other).

• The 'back' and 'forward' buttons are in fact case selectors; Prograph is a case-based language, and all cases accessible through these navigational tools are associated with the same local/method. I do, however, agree that this case-based layout is particularly irritating.

• The major reason for the failure of Prograph is, according to Phil Cox, based on the narrow base of tool support. For a corporation to use a language like Prograph would involve embedding their source code in a set of tools limited to a single vendor (a small one, at that); therefore the survival of that corporation would depend on the survival of the vendor corporation. He actually states that perhaps the key deciding factor in this issue was Apple corporation's refusal to back Prograph as a member of their supported toolset. In the early 90's, Apple considered incorporating Prograph into the standard software distribution set, but for internal political reasons (largely, that their existing textual programmers thought visual programming languages were a stupid idea), the project was cut. He believes that, had Apple supported the software, it would have been a viable choice for a much wider set of corporations, and therefore perhaps have survived; however without this kind of stable backing, uptake simply didn't happen.

In general, I think the critique needs a serious re-working for POV.

Penumbra 2k 22:36, 4 December 2005 (UTC)

Comment - There were some initial discussions between the Prograph and Dylan teams about working together (from a visual point of view Prograph is more operation-oriented than object-oriented (the objects are pretty invisible), which may have had some implications for how to express generic functions, for example), but then Apple cancelled the Dylan project. --szpak

Another comment - I'm not sure what Cox means about "standard software distribution set". Having been in the Mac world throughout this period, the only thing like this I can think of would be MPW. Perhaps he means the Apple' catalogs or something? This is rather unclear to me.

Meanwhile many products were not officially supported, and yet were very successful. Consider that Apple was in the midst of the Bedrock fiasco with Symantec when Code Warrior came out of the blue and pummled the entire market. I sympathize with Cox's take, but the fact is that Prograph failed simply because it didn't get developer eyeballs, for whatever reason (and I stand by my original claim that this is due largely to "weirdness"). Maury 21:02, 18 April 2006 (UTC)

Undercapitalization made it a niche player for its entire lifetime

An anonymous someone at IP address 24.70.193.30 (shawcable.net = shaw.ca = Shaw Communications, handling western Canada) changed the intro text from "However a number of problems in the system, as well as its general "oddity", made it a niche player for its entire lifetime,..." to "Undercapitalization made it a niche player...".

I am not a TGS/PI/Pictorius/whatever insider, but from what I have heard from people who were, the various companies threw an incredible amount of money into the Prograph Developers Network; I have also heard that McLean-Watson poured something like 6 million CA$ into the company after they became involved. Could someone better versed in economics explain to me how this constitutes "undercapitalization". In lieu of any definite evidence one way or the other, I have cut the comment from the article. Please discuss before reverting. RJCraig 19:50, 5 January 2006 (UTC)

Yeah RJ, I'm with you. And it's not like I just made it up in the first place, I can remember discussing the system with my fellow developers at SoftArc, and the response was universally skeptical. Perhaps that's not the way it should have been, but with C++ in the midst of its takeover of the development market, blaming Prograph's problems on a lack of cash strikes me as extremely suspect. Maury 21:02, 18 April 2006 (UTC)

Marten History

I think it would be a good idea to include something about Marten in the history section, since it is a relevant development.

However, I don't believe I myself could manage a NPOV version. Would someone else mind getting the ball rolling? RJCraig 19:53, 5 January 2006 (UTC)

Open Prograph Initiative website

I'm currently planning on shutting down the www.ospgli.org website before the end of August. At that time I'll remove any links in the article. --RJCraig 14:57, 22 July 2007 (UTC)

Discuss Here!

Rather than discussing Critique et al on the main article page, do it here, where agreement can be reached on best content/wording. szpak 18:59, 16 October 2007 (UTC)

I don't think there's really much to discuss. If the criticism can be cited, it can stay. Otherwise, it should go. --Steven Fisher 07:41, 18 October 2007 (UTC)

I'd like to add my professional experience with Prograph to the Critique. I loved the language, and it allowed me to be very productive on some image processing I did at PF. Magic. But the tool had a few flaws that I came to see in other visual programming tools. There was no way to do a 'diff', or integrate a versioning tool like CVS at that time. Second, no one else could easily look over and work with code that someone else had written. Only in some cases did it make sense for me to solve problems using Prograph when no one else at the company was familiar with the tool. Too many text based tools were being developed for improved productivity, and they could not be leveraged against Prograph. All of these issues affetced xUML from Kennedy-Carter; having had the issues with Prograph I was able to enumerate them immediately with Kennedy-Carter - Andrew K. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Akaluzniacki (talk • contribs) 15:57, 28 June 2022 (UTC)