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Yeah, I've tried a handful of visual programming tools in the 90s before I got fluent in a normal programming language. It seemed very easy to start with the fi

Yeah, I've tried a handful of visual programming tools in the 90s before I got fluent in a normal programming language. It seemed very easy to start with the first steps and it was motivating how all the possibilities seemed to be one click away. But in reality the fun stopped really quickly and getting further would require deep understanding of the tool, i.e. reading a lot of - incomplete - documentation. Another tool, I forgot the name but it's used in certain parts of science, in particular it at least used to be in use at the LHC. It seemed quite complete but complex things would easily be difficult to see, at least in the short time I did something with it. IMHO Borland Delphi is the furthest visual programming went so far. I never really understood why IDE developers didn't pursue that path any further. (I know there's still a Delphi but almost nobody uses it.)

Retra 7y ago
It seems you understand why perfectly well: it's a lot of work to do for little actual benefit. >Another tool, I forgot the name I suspect you might be referring to labVIEW?
- blablabla123 7y ago
  Yeah probably. Still this is something I think of, also wondering whether eventually programming might become commoditized by new tools. So the question was already asked by other commenters, maybe there's an argument on can make why this won't work. Yes, I do. :)
goto11 7y ago
Can you mention some examples? I'm not familiar with Delphi.
- blablabla123 7y ago
  Yes sure. Sorry, this is quite a stretch from the topic because Delphi hardly allows logic to be written visually in contrast to the other tools mentioned. But you can 'click' together your whole UI. It is very intuitive where to find the most important handlers (onClick for buttons, onSelect for list...), you double-click, a piece of code gets generated and your cursor lands within the generated stub code for that. Also you have a good browser for objects. Actually one time I was playing with some Direct3D plugin, that was really easy to get started with and to move something around (in the 90s!). Not knowing anything about maintainability or how to approach problems, this was really fun to work with. I think the Microsoft Visual Basic might resemble these things to some degree, but I never tried it. Also Object Pascal is a more powerful and concise language in comparison. Oh and I didn't mention the fabulous documentation. They really did their homework, once you built the help search index you could search for each available library function. Really cool stuff actually. I've tried other IDEs like Borland C++ Builder, KDevelop and the QT Designer, NetBeans, Eclipse but they didn't even come close to that. After a friend strongly recommended me to work with editors I completely lost interest in IDEs actually. (Nowadays I'd use some React boilerplate to quickly assemble a UI, but that was quite some work and practice ;))

Retra 7y ago

It seems you understand why perfectly well: it's a lot of work to do for little actual benefit. >Another tool, I forgot the name I suspect you might be referring to labVIEW?

blablabla123 7y ago
Yeah probably. Still this is something I think of, also wondering whether eventually programming might become commoditized by new tools. So the question was already asked by other commenters, maybe there's an argument on can make why this won't work. Yes, I do. :)

goto11 7y ago

Can you mention some examples? I'm not familiar with Delphi.

blablabla123 7y ago
Yes sure. Sorry, this is quite a stretch from the topic because Delphi hardly allows logic to be written visually in contrast to the other tools mentioned. But you can 'click' together your whole UI. It is very intuitive where to find the most important handlers (onClick for buttons, onSelect for list...), you double-click, a piece of code gets generated and your cursor lands within the generated stub code for that. Also you have a good browser for objects. Actually one time I was playing with some Direct3D plugin, that was really easy to get started with and to move something around (in the 90s!). Not knowing anything about maintainability or how to approach problems, this was really fun to work with. I think the Microsoft Visual Basic might resemble these things to some degree, but I never tried it. Also Object Pascal is a more powerful and concise language in comparison. Oh and I didn't mention the fabulous documentation. They really did their homework, once you built the help search index you could search for each available library function. Really cool stuff actually. I've tried other IDEs like Borland C++ Builder, KDevelop and the QT Designer, NetBeans, Eclipse but they didn't even come close to that. After a friend strongly recommended me to work with editors I completely lost interest in IDEs actually. (Nowadays I'd use some React boilerplate to quickly assemble a UI, but that was quite some work and practice ;))