Yes and Yes. VPLs are indeed specific purpose and its because of information density. Contrary to what you may believe a VPL is not the evolution of TPL , its

Yes and Yes. VPLs are indeed specific purpose and its because of information density. Contrary to what you may believe a VPL is not the evolution of TPL , its actually the evolution of GUI. Reaktor for example is an evolution of VSTs , synthesiser and audio effect plugins that are GUIs. VPLs in 3d are an evolution of the gui properties for material , textures etc (they are not even referred to as VPL). Even in Unreal even though Blueprint has replaced Unrealscript , its an extension of the editor GUI. VPLs are successful specifically because the information density is so large that a linear GUI is not enough. The success of TPL is legacy, its just has a lot of libraries. Mainly because its easier to make and has been around a lot longer. However to be sincere here when we talk about TPLs we also cherrypick , we do not think of Assembly, Pascal, Cobol and Fortran but rather C/C++ , Java, C#, ruby, Python and Javascript. The truth is that 99.9% of TPLs have failed to gain approval of not just the users but also the coders too. But I am not denying the fact that a TPL will target mostly pro coders than users and that VPL will target mostly users than coders. They are just different kinds of beasts making the comparison more than challenging.