That was a good summary, was useful and really enjoyed reading it. The key takeaway for me, which really reified ideas I have about UI design tools, was this:

That was a good summary, was useful and really enjoyed reading it. The key takeaway for me, which really reified ideas I have about UI design tools, was this: > At the opposite end of the spectrum is, say, an oil painting, which is also a visual medium but much more of an unconstrained, freeform one, where brushstrokes can swirl in any arbitrary pattern. This freedom is useful in artistic fields, where rich ambiguous associative meaning is the whole point, but becomes a nuisance in technical contexts...[elided]...Drag-n-drop editors arguably lose a lot of the features of ‘true’ languages by giving up structure, and more programmatic elements are likely to still use a constrained set of primitives. That's the key problem afaics, and why UI design tools + codegen never works well outside of highly constrained situations. There are two conflicting practices: programming and visual design. And they overlap, obviously, but they don't properly mesh. The tool either goes in the programmatic direction, which makes codegen much easier but drastically curtails the ability to design properly. Or it goes in the design direction and makes codegen either very difficult or forces generation of absolute garbage code (for worst examples, see tools that generate enormous amounts of absolutely positioned HTML elements with inline styles on everything). And there's no real middle ground (not that this stops endless attempts to square the circle).