AVS/Express [1] had a great visual programming system 20 years ago for building 3D visualisation systems. They called it the Network Editor [2]. It was very sim

AVS/Express [1] had a great visual programming system 20 years ago for building 3D visualisation systems. They called it the Network Editor [2]. It was very similar to the Unreal Engine Blueprint system. I've also played with MIT's Scratch environment, which is very visual too, but a little more like a traditional imperative language that the data flow connection style of AVS/Express or UE4 Blueprints. So I strongly agree with the author's contention that "there are some mistakes that are so appealing they will be made over and over again". Appealing because visual programming environments hold out the promise of enabling non developers to develop software. They do a good job of hiding the syntactic complexity of traditional programming, but they can't hide all the semantic complexity of objects, memory, stacks, variables, processes, threads, databases etc. But there is one functional, grid based visual programming environment that has been hugely successful in enabling end users to create their own software solutions: Microsoft Excel. [1] http://www.avs.com/solutions/express/ http://www.avs.com/solutions/express/ [2] https://cdsweb.cern.ch/record/400582/files/p69.pdf https://cdsweb.cern.ch/record/400582/files/p69.pdf