The most visual language/IDE I’ve ever used. Hasn’t been available on the Mac in some time, but when I used it it was… stellar. Complex but beautiful. The tutorial was kind of wretched, though.

Any other ProGraph pseudoveterans out there?

– RobRix

I’m a Prograph veteran (I wrote the book on it). A bunch of us are looking into creating an open source implementation of the Prograph language. I’m trying to convince everybody to use Objective-C and Cocoa as the underlying programming language and framework (with GnuStep on Linux and Windoze).

– ScottSteinman

:O <- no further comment. – RobRix

Actually, I do have further comment. I’m currently in the process of writing a general-purpose network graph view (more like a tree graph view, but still) in IoLanguage for Europa. My purpose is to allow wiring up of functors in e.g. Chromosome (nee Lodestone) and Touchstone, but it could potentially be used to wire up all sorts of object graphs.

Of course, IoLanguage only has ObjC bindings on OS X, so you’d be out of luck for cross-platform Cocoa-framework-ness, and Cocoa really is worth it. – RobRix

There is some OpenSource MacOSX ProGraph activity being done here: http://www.ospgli.org/

And there is a new commercial product available here: http://www.andescotia.com/

The Marten programming environment (by Andescotia) is a Carbon-based rewrite of Prograph. The open source group (OSPGLI) is writing three versions at present, two of which will probably be merged: (1) A pure Cocoa version, (2) a version with Python as its intermediate language, and (3) a Windows version. – ScottSteinman

Thanks for the links guys. I wrote a MMRPG back in the day called Mage Princes using Prograph. I was saddened when it went defunct. I’ll check out Marten. –Alex

I and a colleague used Prograph to produce a highly-regarded music education program (Musica Analytica), which we sold until support died out. We sold both Mac and Windows (98) versions. We must have put in many thousands of hours over the years, and it took several hours to “compile” the application. I have not seen the equivalent IDE yet - the only truly graphical IDE and a great OO environment. It also supported high level, non-executable top-down design through data flow diagramming by senior/non-programmers. Then programmers could seamlessly take over implementation.

Why am I writing this? Prograph surely has a resurrection awaiting in production of mobile apps. I would have thought that iOS would be a prime target. I am just getting back in the saddle after a hiatus as manager and would be so happy to see Prograph takes its rightful place. – Denniseck