4 ms·
Well, so you're using the term "visual" as though it were a commonly understood term, but implicitly excluding all of Microsoft's products with Visual in the na
by perl4ever 6y ago
Well, so you're using the term "visual" as though it were a commonly understood term, but implicitly excluding all of Microsoft's products with Visual in the name?
I've been trying to implement something with Power Automate, and presumably that's "mainstream", but it strikes me as falling into the classic pattern of appealing to buyers rather than users. I feel 10-100 times less productive than with, say, VBA, for no advantage.
One thing that is particularly frustrating to me is that it's so slow and buggy I am afraid of losing my work at any moment. You can't save your work unless it passes preliminary validation, but sometimes reopening it makes it invalid by removing quotes or whatever. Copying something out and pasting it back often fails to validate too, as the transformations are not inverses like they should be. Sometimes it just gets corrupted entirely. I'm not aware of any way to manage versions, or undo beyond a few trivial actions.
But the more fundamental reason I hate this is because it seems not to be designed to let you take a chunk of logic and use it in a modular way. At least this style of "visual programming" seems to apply the disadvantages of physically building things out of blocks, where it's entirely unnecessary. You've got some chain of actions A->B->C, but the stuff inside those actions is on a different level; you can't take that chunk of stuff and use it as a tool to do more sophisticated things. As far as I can tell. I keep thinking "it can't be as simplistic as it seems" and thinking I'm about to find a way to create general functions.
See: https://flow.microsoft.com/en-us/ https://flow.microsoft.com/en-us/
- prewett 6y agoVisual Studio : visual programming :: VI (VIsual editor) : Blender
- perl4ever 6y agoThat's one possible reason, but anyway, that's implicitly why I brought up Power Automate, to determine if that was the reason. Would you call it (formerly Microsoft Flow) visual programming? Because it certainly is frustrating to me in a way that traditional programming is not. Anything this awful must qualify as visual programming... Today I was trying to figure out if I could work around some of my problems by converting everything to XML and using XPath to manipulate it but I didn't get far and apparently Microsoft only does XPath 1.0.