Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Graphical language

Graphical language

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No assertion of notability, unreferenced, and lacks clear focus on a single topic. Diego Moya (talk) 23:17, 21 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Delete and redirect somehwere A graphical language is a language that uses graphic constructs lexically, like a written language (pictographic, most obviously, but any written language, since they all use graphemes) 65.94.45.160 (talk) 07:13, 22 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Merge to Visual language per the existing suggestion. Colonel Warden (talk) 09:30, 22 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]

What content do you feel could be merged? Almost all of it is unreferenced, and frankly it reads as an essay about language theory in general; there's really few content specific about graphical language. And a Chinese web page being an example of graphical language? A few recognizable visual characteristics in links don't constitute a language IMHO. So what would you place at Visual language and how? Diego Moya (talk) 21:05, 22 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Turn into a disambiguation page: "Graphical language can refer to: ▪ a computer language for creating or describing computer graphics / ▪ a visual language. --Lambiam 00:34, 24 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Graphical language should be specifically for formal languages used on computers Gmstanley (talk) 04:39, 25 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]

"Graphical language" should be separate, focusing on formal, graphical modeling languages used on computers. These are common, for instance for workflows - reference the BPMN article in Wikipedia. They are also used in monitoring and control, as in the GDA reference cited, or in the "Sequential Function Chart" article in Wikipedia (based on the earlier GRAFCET graphical language, used for PLCs), or in the graphical language used as cited in the Wikipedia article on LabVIEW. While the current "graphical language" page is currently a bit of a hodgepodge that needs focus, it still differs from the "visual language" article. The "visual language article is even more of a hodgepodge of psychology, art, etc., focusing on how humans interact with each other.

There's a visual programming language article for that already.Diego Moya (talk) 05:00, 25 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Note: This debate has been included in the list of Computing-related deletion discussions. -- • Gene93k (talk) 03:33, 27 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]

I wasn't aware of that page until now. That could cover some cases. I would say that many graphical languages

used on computers are not really visual programming languages, though. To me, a real "programming language" generally emphasizes specification of a series of steps - it is basically procedural (although some of those procedures are what to do to respond to events, etc.). But some modeling languages are truly declarative. That is, they don't specify steps. They are typically a model of some aspect of the real world or perhaps a computer application. As an example, consider a graphical language that allows someone to represent a fault tree graphically. That's a completely declarative representation of how faults propagate, e.g., how various root causes of something like loss of coolant in a nuclear reactor propagate to cause the loss of coolant, and then propagate further leading to release of radioactive gas, etc. That model stands by itself independent of its usage. It could be used for prediction -- e.g., mark a valve as stuck, and follow the implications to see what will happen. Conversely, hypothesize an event like loss of coolant, and trace back through the diagram to figure out what might have caused it. Or, estimate the future probabilities of events based on the probabilities of failures of each of the root causes. The point is that different "engines" treat the same graphical model differently, even though it's the same model. It's up to an "engine" to decide what to do with that model. (I've been involved with graphical languages that make multiple uses of given graphical models.) A workflow representation like BPMN is a representation of something that is essentially procedural, so might be considered a graphical programming language, but not all graphical languages are like that. Gmstanley (talk) 19:21, 27 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]