Or maybe LabVIEW needs a better editor/IDE. I very quickly gave up with Franz Lisp on a VAX running Berkeley Unix not because of any deficiency in the languag

Or maybe LabVIEW needs a better editor/IDE. I very quickly gave up with Franz Lisp on a VAX running Berkeley Unix not because of any deficiency in the language but because I had to use vi to edit it. There have been only two languages (Prograph and Max) with any similarity to LabVIEW which have gained significant numbers of users, so the space of visual dataflow languages hasn't been explored enough to write them all off. LabVIEW was designed in the 1980s when nothing similar to base it on existed, and various design choices were committed to which didn't work out well. In the following decades, many advances in language design took place or were widely adopted and would be difficult to retrofit to an language of that era. I've only read about LabVIEW, but I have a fair amount of experience designing another visual dataflow language, Full Metal Jacket (http://web.onetel.com/~hibou/fmj/FMJ.html http://web.onetel.com/~hibou/fmj/FMJ.html). In Full Metal Jacket's IDE, opening a function definition is done by right-clicking on its vertex (rectangle); connecting an output of one vertex to an input of a second vertex by dragging the mouse cursor in its general direction and releasing or, if the the second vertex is absent, right clicking on the output and dragging the vertex from another window. Hovering over a vertex displays its documentation string, hovering over inputs or outputs displays their types. I adopted some ideas from functional programming languages - simple syntax from Lisp along with Gabriel's MIT approach, strong static typing with type inference from Haskell and ML, tagged data and a few other ideas from experimental dataflow hardware (I knew the people involved in this both at Cumbernauld and Manchester); and some vocabulary from graph theory. It was obvious to me very early on that there was no way anyone could honestly market dataflow languages at people who don't consider themselves programmers. Not only do you still need to design algorithms, you have to think in a completely new way.