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I'm not a visual programming proponent, but I don't think this article does a very good job of supporting its thesis. It exclusively makes claims about current

I'm not a visual programming proponent, but I don't think this article does a very good job of supporting its thesis. It exclusively makes claims about current VP implementations and tries to extrapolate them to VP in the abstract, but I think these are all non-sequiturs. I specifically think the article fails to distinguish between the dual problems of _modeling a program_ (hard) and representing that model visually vs textually. For example, the article claims that the idea behind scratch is that programming is fundamentally easy but text makes it hard. I don't think that's the idea at all, but rather that programming (i.e., modeling a program) is fundamentally hard, but the difficulty is compounded because text is not a natural way for the current crop of humans to think about a program. Another example is his criticism of the failure of enterprise UML tools--presumably the problem with these is that UML is just not a very good way of _modeling a computer program_, regardless of whether the interface to UML is visual or textual. Another example is the criticism that the current crop of VP tools are procedural. Why can't a visual programming language be functional? Another is the claim that VP is bad because the current crop of tools combines visual and textual programming (I'm not sure this is even true; I don't recall LabVIEW requiring text, for example). Is there any fundamental reason a programming model can't be purely visual? Why can't you represent a whole programming model (all the way down to primitives) visually? I think most of these would be solved with more trial and error and more investment; none of these support the thesis that VP is fundamentally a bad idea. To be clear, I think this article has a lot to offer people who are trying to solve visual programming issues, but it doesn't make the case that it sets out to do--that visual programming is fundamentally a waste of time.

zby 8y ago
"Why can't a visual programming language be functional?" - there is one: https://luna-lang.org/ https://luna-lang.org/ and it also has a dual textual/visual representation.
pbazant 8y ago
I agree wholeheartedly with your comment -- no-one is actually saying that programming is fundamentally easy. I'd go even further and say that textual vs visual is a bit of a false dichotomy. Text is a form of visual notation. We format our source code carefully to achieve specific visual effects. The same AST can be rendered in many different ways of various visual richness. Formatted text is just one point in a continuum of possible visualisations of the same AST.

zby 8y ago

"Why can't a visual programming language be functional?" - there is one: https://luna-lang.org/ https://luna-lang.org/ and it also has a dual textual/visual representation.

pbazant 8y ago

I agree wholeheartedly with your comment -- no-one is actually saying that programming is fundamentally easy. I'd go even further and say that textual vs visual is a bit of a false dichotomy. Text is a form of visual notation. We format our source code carefully to achieve specific visual effects. The same AST can be rendered in many different ways of various visual richness. Formatted text is just one point in a continuum of possible visualisations of the same AST.