Why isn't visual programning more popular? If a picture tells a thousand words, and diagrams and figures are so helpful, why hasn't visual programming taken ov

Why isn't visual programning more popular? If a picture tells a thousand words, and diagrams and figures are so helpful, why hasn't visual programming taken over? The problem is the complexity of overlaid graphs. Text, through references, handles this well and planar layouts do not. Consider also the density of information; an example is a (visual) AST of an arithmetic expreasion, versus the conventional symbolic representation. You could make a visual tool to build arithmetic trees. It's a very clear repreaentation, easy to follow and would be fun to use. But... real fast... it becomes unweildy. So, visual programming is great for simple problems, by non-programmers. As other commenters have said, there are a lot of non-programmers in game development - I think most of it is non-programming these days. Another category is new users. People play games, and then want to make games. Visual programming is more like a game than text programming is. Some of these people really are just "playing" at making games (nothing wrong with that!) But some of them are earnestly making a game - and the fewer obstacles in their way (like learning how to program), the better. Get them onboard, get them started - better for them, better for Epic, and better for the world to get the games they've come up with. Finally, because of text superiority, programming infrastructure (e.g. git) is also text-based. BTW spreadsheets are kinda visual, and very popular. "Visual Basic" has some visual programming elements, for GUIs. There's some business tools, like XML mappers, that are visual.