If you say anything long enough and loud enough, people will eventually believe it. How else can you account for the widespread belief that the Arch Deluxe is a hamburger, that smoking is cool, or that Windows 3 is an operating system.
Likewise in the programming community, "visual programming" has been defined by packages such as Visual Basic, Visual C++, Delphi, and PowerBuilder. Still, as powerful as they are, these tools are as to "visual" as "rap" is to "music," or "jumbo" to "shrimp." In truth, as Marc Najork pointed out in "Visual Programming in 3-D" (DDJ, December 1995), these tools serve as a rudimentary graphical scaffold on which you hang pieces of program text. At some point, you have to resort to C++, Basic, or Java to complete the job.
True visual-programming environments, on the other hand, have no hidden text, opting instead to use visual notation to represent computations. Among other benefits, true visual-programming tools improve the programming process by letting you focus in a more intuitive fashion on the problem being solved.
For the past ten years or so, the voice crying in the visual wilderness has been the annual IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages. As a special part of the 1997 conference, which will be held September 23-26 in Capri, Italy, the University of Kansas DesignLab is hosting the "1997 Visual Programming Challenge." Co-sponsored by the National Science Foundation, the Visual Programming Challenge's objective is to acknowledge and reward approaches to visual languages that promise to ease software-development efforts. The competition, which is open to all comers, requires you to implement quasi-real-time control of a robotic vehicle constructed from LEGO parts.
You can build the robotic vehicle from scratch or apply for a kit award. The kits include a vehicle of a standard design constructed from LEGO parts, an on-board HandyBoard (complete with sensors and motors), software to support the standard design, and a sample set of LEGO road tiles with modification instructions. The software allows both low-level control of the basic drivers for sensors, motors, clocks, and the like, and high-level control specific to the LEGO road system.
The awards committee will assemble and distribute ten kits to entrants, based on the strength of selected proposals. For proposals that do not receive award kits, specifications, part lists, plans, software, and sources are available.
The Round One at-large competition involves both a compulsory and open problem. The Round Two final competition requires solving an impromptu problem at VL '97 conference in Italy. The final winner will be determined by a combination of the results of the at-large and final competitions.
The challenge of the at-large competition is to design, implement, and demonstrate a language that can be used to solve a specified class of problems by as large a group of users as possible. The language can be any combination of visual, multimodal, or textual representations and interactions. The language design will be of primary interest to the judging committee. The specified problems are those associated with programming a robotic vehicle, running software, and maintaining control via a communications protocol.
The compulsory problem requires you to explore and map an unknown system of roads, including straight sections, curves, and intersections. The open problem is any task of your choice that involves some aspect of controlling the robotic vehicle on the road system--the objective being to allow you to show off the strengths of your language. The impromptu problem at the Symposium will consist of a "mystery" problem to work out in a limited amount of time.
A minimum of four finalists will be invited to compete in the final competition at VL '97 in Capri. The top four individuals or teams will be awarded partial travel-expense reimbursements.
You'll have to hurry to apply for a kit award: These will be made in early December (luckily, many of you are reading this issue of DDJ in early November). At-large competition entries are due May 26, 1997. Finalists will be announced on June 30.
For more details on the contest, check out the "1997 Visual Programming Challenge" home page at http://www.designlab.ukans.edu/~ambler/vpc.html. Specific questions can be directed to Allen Ambler, chair of the awards committee, at ambler@eecs.ukans.edu.
We'll keep you posted on the challenge, and publish an article about the winning entries when they are announced.
Jonathan Erickson
editor-in-chief