"Programming" is just giving a computer instructions. Visual programming is therefore just giving a computer instructions using a visual medium. Instructions f

"Programming" is just giving a computer instructions. Visual programming is therefore just giving a computer instructions using a visual medium. Instructions for a computer can be quite simple or quite complex. There are many ways we have to represent these instructions with text, but we also all recognize that most programs are far too complex to represent in text that a person can keep in their brain all at once. If a person believes they remember how a program works because they read its source code in text form, they're actually mistaken. Their brain is actually tricking them: it has read lines of code, and created abstract representations of groups of those lines, and it's the collections of the abstract representations that form "the program" in their brain. Nobody thinks about a program as "line 27 operation 3". They think of that one module, with that one function, that has one in-put and two out-puts, that does a certain thingy in the middle of it, etc. This is true for every single aspect of a computer (hardware or software). The fact that people have imagination is the only reason anyone understands how a program works. With text programming, you're slowly "crafting" the abstract representation, one line (or concept) at a time. A graphical interface for source code is the inverse: you're creating the abstract representations first and connecting them together, and the computer generates the lines/concepts to make it work. This article is discussing different ways of representing that process, but the general concept is identical no matter how you use it. You come up with abstract concepts and connect them. The specific ways in which you do that, how you visualize it, what kind of concepts, at what layers, etc, is certainly useful, but not really the point. The point is to be able to get your ideas down as abstracts and let the computer figure out the nitty gritty details. Why do that instead of with text? Because pictures let you explore many concepts in many ways without needing to keep them all in your head or look for references. The picture keeps everything "in memory" (on screen) so your brain doesn't have to keep all the concepts in your short term memory, and you don't have to think about unnecessary details. It's a brain hack: the picture is a buffer for your imagination.