This article provides a good overview of the problems and pitfalls of visual programming languages and environments and why their perceived benefits have not be

This article provides a good overview of the problems and pitfalls of visual programming languages and environments and why their perceived benefits have not been realized up to now. I'd add one more. Cobol has gotten a lot of attention lately and although not "visual" in any sense whatsoever, had the goal of making programming accessible to managers and business users by adopting paragraphs and sentences to add structure to programs. Which is great and fine for trivial examples, but in practice the 25,000+ LOC real programs (and thousands of these in typical systems) were/are inscrutable to everyone but the specialist. The inherent problem is the lack of primitives to build abstractions to "move the langauge toward the problem domain". These primitives can be first class functions, objects, macros, etc [1]. Visual programming environments I've seen also fail to provide any such mechanisms as this article supports. [1] http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html