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Thanks for the anecdotal perspective. That's interesting! As someone who cut their teeth on a graphical language and is a big diagramming person, it's always b

by bmitc 2y ago

Thanks for the anecdotal perspective. That's interesting! As someone who cut their teeth on a graphical language and is a big diagramming person, it's always been curious to me as to why people want to write out stuff in text. It often feels extremely primitive. I've done large codebases in a graphical language before, and it felt so easy to orient myself as to where I was at in the system. In text-based languages, I feel lost in a sea of text that has almost zero differentiating factors.

kamaal 2y ago
There are lots of reason for why text is preferable though. I did some work on an drag-and-drop sort of a programming language for a ETL pipeline a while back. The absence of unit test cases makes it very hard to deploy changes without being sure you are not introducing breaking changes. There are other things as well. People tend to make big flow in one canvas. Which makes it very hard to understand. There are few more things, like wherever a GUI component relevant to a case was missing, the tool provided a way to add a javascript snippet, eventually on some canvases all you see is JS components talking to each other. At that point you are better off writing plain JS code.