Years ago I bounced around from one visual tool to another, never mastering any of them but getting deep enough to see the flaws. Hypercard, Authorware, Directo

Years ago I bounced around from one visual tool to another, never mastering any of them but getting deep enough to see the flaws. Hypercard, Authorware, Director, Flash. They were all very approachable, but they were all incredibly flawed in the end. You'd spend most of your time jumping from one limitation to the next, trying to hack your way out of the spaghetti jungle. I think the better approach is to use conventional languages with UI tools layered on top that at worst generate readable code. (Like I assume is often done in game development.) Source control and diffing are indispensable. The lure of these tools is that they are approachable, which sometimes is exactly what you need to get started. It's just very rarely what you need to finish. So let these tools be used to get people interested in programming, or to give people an idea of how to accomplish a project. But more importantly let's make sure to continue taking steps to demystify coding. Not because we want everyone to be programmers, but because when people do choose to program we want them to be able to collaborate with the rest of the world, and when they leave we don't want to inherit some visual pasta dish.