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IMO, Visual programming does not have a proper definition yet. Coding frontend and coding backend are altogether two different things and sometimes users confus

IMO, Visual programming does not have a proper definition yet. Coding frontend and coding backend are altogether two different things and sometimes users confuse the application of visual authoring (programming) in one area with the other. But I believe it is the future. I bet you won't be carrying your laptop, enslaved by the physical keyboard, which is necessary for traditional 'coding' with you in 2030. You would be dragging and dropping stuff, perhaps in Virtual reality headset or through voice or gesture to build what you want, just like you would author in a visual platform like Adobe illustrator or in a 3d authoring tool. Visual programming have it's own strength and weaknesses. For e.g. Creating algorithms from scratch in a Visual programming is not very productive (yet), but authoring business logic is highly effective in Visual programming. How many times, as a regular programmer you have had to write an algorithm? Most often it's just business logic that we tag under the category of an algorithm, which is not right. Algorithms are very generic piece of logic and business logic applies to your own problem/data specifically. If you have a closer look you realize that we are simply reusing algorithms or modules (created by a smaller group of people comparatively) to build the rules/business logic. What we do is mostly write glue code. we don't really need to code for that. There are tons of examples for highly successful application of visual programming. But as an average web developer you never get to see that. Reason - Visual authoring tools are highly expensive and hence are confined to fortune 500 companies. That along with lack of quality open source implementations are the reason for visual programming to never take off among general web programming community. Even the newer generation ones like Treeline (for backend) and Bubble.is (frontend) are also closed source. NoFlo is open source and it almost started to create some buzz, but the team got sidetracked apparently, and they are using dataflow method for authoring frontend which is a highly inefficient. You want to see successful application of Visual programming in real life? Ever heard of Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) ? Business Process Automation (BPMN/BPEL) ? Extract Transform and Load (ETL)? They all employ Visual programming to a great extend and are multi-billion dollar businesses. Do a google image search of following, in no particular order. Dell bhoomi (EAI) Tibco Business Works (EAI) Snaplogic (Founded by Informatica ex. CEO) (EAI) MuleESB/Anypoint studio (EAI) Oracle BPEL (Business process automation) Tibco iProcess (Business process automation) Mendix (Web app development) Webratio (Web app development) (+lots of others if you dig out)

wvenable 11y ago
> I bet you won't be carrying your laptop, enslaved by the physical keyboard, which is necessary for traditional 'coding' with you in 2030. I disagree. I wouldn't have thought that Microsoft, author of Visual Basic, would be basically forced in 2015 to add improvements to their console system -- but here we are. If anything text-based programming is more prominent now than in the last 10 years. > You would be dragging and dropping stuff, perhaps in Virtual reality headset or through voice or gesture to build what you want, just like you would author in a visual platform like Adobe illustrator or in a 3d authoring tool. Your arms will get very tired. > but authoring business logic is highly effective in Visual programming. I disagree. We have one giant visual-programmed workflow solution and it's a very modern and powerful system but it's also insane to work with. You can describe the problem in text with much clearer than trying to follow a diagram that won't fit on a dozen screens in either direction. > Reason - Visual authoring tools are highly expensive and hence are confined to fortune 500 companies. They are snake-oil; nearly something you can only sell for millions of dollars to people who make billions of dollars. You need a team of highly paid expert consultants to make changes because nobody else knows these systems or wants to know them. It's like going back 30 years in terms of expressive power.
- mrslave 11y ago
  Second. I am a competent programmer who degrades himself in the drudgery of business rules and visual ETL (DataStage, Informatica, etc.) and I do it only for the money. So many of the problems are trivially solved with small programs, or even gasp just plain SQL. I concede there are features delivered by these fancy ETL tools beyond the quick (but not dirty) of custom solutions, but the overheads are higher too and I believe a cost-benefit analysis would invalidate the supposed business cases for using these tools. This is not not-invented-here syndrome. This is simpler and cheaper. The problem for my case often is previous attempts to do it ourselves are shit. That's not a problem with the technology. :P Behind the scenes I've solved hundreds of problems - one-off or on-going, small and large - by writing custom applications. This is the real increase in productivity that justifies my fee.
- murukesh_s 11y ago
  >Your arms will get very tired. Ha ha, What about voice? Even without fancy stuff like gesture or voice, actually it wont be tiring. In fact if you prefer to use keyboard, you can solely work using pure keyboard to perform all of the visual wiring using configured shortcuts. It would be then much less effort (in terms of typing) that in traditional coding, as you don't need to do any boilerplate coding. > I disagree. We have one giant visual-programmed workflow solution. Why couldn't you break it up into multiple sub-workflows? > They are snake-oil Agreed. we need great open source solutions to move the needle from where it's been stuck for over several decades.

wvenable 11y ago

> I bet you won't be carrying your laptop, enslaved by the physical keyboard, which is necessary for traditional 'coding' with you in 2030. I disagree. I wouldn't have thought that Microsoft, author of Visual Basic, would be basically forced in 2015 to add improvements to their console system -- but here we are. If anything text-based programming is more prominent now than in the last 10 years. > You would be dragging and dropping stuff, perhaps in Virtual reality headset or through voice or gesture to build what you want, just like you would author in a visual platform like Adobe illustrator or in a 3d authoring tool. Your arms will get very tired. > but authoring business logic is highly effective in Visual programming. I disagree. We have one giant visual-programmed workflow solution and it's a very modern and powerful system but it's also insane to work with. You can describe the problem in text with much clearer than trying to follow a diagram that won't fit on a dozen screens in either direction. > Reason - Visual authoring tools are highly expensive and hence are confined to fortune 500 companies. They are snake-oil; nearly something you can only sell for millions of dollars to people who make billions of dollars. You need a team of highly paid expert consultants to make changes because nobody else knows these systems or wants to know them. It's like going back 30 years in terms of expressive power.

mrslave 11y ago
Second. I am a competent programmer who degrades himself in the drudgery of business rules and visual ETL (DataStage, Informatica, etc.) and I do it only for the money. So many of the problems are trivially solved with small programs, or even gasp just plain SQL. I concede there are features delivered by these fancy ETL tools beyond the quick (but not dirty) of custom solutions, but the overheads are higher too and I believe a cost-benefit analysis would invalidate the supposed business cases for using these tools. This is not not-invented-here syndrome. This is simpler and cheaper. The problem for my case often is previous attempts to do it ourselves are shit. That's not a problem with the technology. :P Behind the scenes I've solved hundreds of problems - one-off or on-going, small and large - by writing custom applications. This is the real increase in productivity that justifies my fee.
murukesh_s 11y ago
>Your arms will get very tired. Ha ha, What about voice? Even without fancy stuff like gesture or voice, actually it wont be tiring. In fact if you prefer to use keyboard, you can solely work using pure keyboard to perform all of the visual wiring using configured shortcuts. It would be then much less effort (in terms of typing) that in traditional coding, as you don't need to do any boilerplate coding. > I disagree. We have one giant visual-programmed workflow solution. Why couldn't you break it up into multiple sub-workflows? > They are snake-oil Agreed. we need great open source solutions to move the needle from where it's been stuck for over several decades.