Vorlath continues in his quest to prove Fred Brooks wrong, and mostly shows that he's really good at seeing trees. Forests? Not so much. He takes this assertion from "The Mythical Man Month":

Software is invisible and unvisualizable.

And attempts to call it debunked by pulling out a domain specific modeling tool example:

Let me debunk this once and for all. Take a look here . That's the node editor in Blender. With a certain set of primitive components, you can build ANY software. Anything in existence. So I'm not talking about Blender the software, or how to build the node editor. I'm talking about building software within the node editor. It works. And people like using it. This point of Brooks' that software is invisible is dead wrong. It's false. And it should be done with once and for all. People used to say that we'd never use graphical GUI's because text was so much faster and took less memory. Brooks says the screen is too small. Tell that to the people that make Blender and Lightwave.

We've just debunked 25% of Brooks' argument.

Not so much, no. You've shown a limited example for a fairly small field. There are fairly serious issues with the example - try building any non-trivial application using that kind of screen modeling. You quickly end up in what we used to call "green haze" with IBM's UI painter for VisualAge, or the old Digitalk PARTS system. It works really well for demos and relatively small examples. It doesn't scale at all well as your component space scales, because you quickly run out of screen turf for all the connecting wires.

There's also the small matter of the software that builds that modeler - is it also built in the modeler? Somehow I doubt it.

For any global assertion - like the ones from Brooks - it's easy to find anecdotal exceptions. It's fairly hard to find general cases that argue against him though.

Here's a question - if that kind of visual modeling is an actual debunking, then why is Vorlath bothering to design a new language? If he's found a general exception to Brooks' assertion, he should just be able to adopt the Blender system, right?

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