Around 1977-1978 I tutored a friend that was a fellow engineer. I could not get him to write structured programs. He insisted on creating large flowcharts with

Around 1977-1978 I tutored a friend that was a fellow engineer. I could not get him to write structured programs. He insisted on creating large flowcharts with lines going in all directions. He had been introduced to this "visual" form of programming, and he kept going back to it each time he tried to construct a program. His programs ended up with state distributed all over the place and an impossible to keep track of control flow. Around the same time, I was intrigued by articles promising easy visual construction of programs; it seemed to be in vogue then. I took me several years to realize that the nice examples in journal articles were just that, nice examples. Visual programming is appealing, like flowcharts to my friend, but they suffer from lack of good support for building abstractions and an inefficient method of building visual programs and keeping track of changes.