I used to be in the camp thinking that we should be using way more visual programming tools. I even worked at a startup company building a "software factory" (e

I used to be in the camp thinking that we should be using way more visual programming tools. I even worked at a startup company building a "software factory" (essentially a tool for generating a DB and an accompanying front-end which can load a metamodel for that DB and builds an interface for it). Nowadays I do think that visual programming is better for domain-specific purposes. I also think that for many purposes code is a suitable abstraction layer on top of machine instructions. Meanwhile abstraction means removing nonessential detail, however for a general purpose programming language one cannot predict which features are essential in a specific application. That's why visual programming is working in domain-specific areas, because in that case you can often decide which details are nonessential.