Vislang

March 28, 2026

– Try It Now! –

Screenshot of the Vislang browser editor with graph nodes and connections — The current prototype: a browser-based visual editor that compiles node-and-edge graphs into Scheme.

“Vislang” is a graph-style visual programming language and editor that runs in the browser. The app parses your nodes-and-edges program into Scheme code and hands that off to an external library for evaluation. The graph UI uses React Flow.

Implementing Vislang has been a fun challenge - a unique exercise in mapping textual program syntax onto a graph-style UI while preserving correctness. A real crash course in webdev, UX, and programming language design, as someone who is new to all three.

At the time of writing, Vislang is just a toy prototype that supports a small subset of Scheme. Beyond implementing missing language features, there are many exciting possible directions:

add incremental parsing, enabling a real-time view of the Scheme parse output and IDE-like syntax error warnings.
a full UX rehaul, with things like keyboard shortcuts and automatic graph layouting (via heuristics-based algorithms like ELK).
add interactive “step-through” debugging with animations
make a puzzle game! (code-golf, node/edge restrictions, time trials while “bugs” crawl around and mess up your code, etc.)
add support for mobile devices

Look out for these updates in the future!