Do you think they can be powerful enough to build production-grade applications some day or are they going to stay as educational tools or build into specific applications forever?
Do you think they can be powerful enough to build production-grade applications some day or are they going to stay as educational tools or build into specific applications forever?
My intro to visual programming was back in about 1993 with Adobe Authorware, which had it’s final release in 2003. I’ve used a few tools since then, most recently GNU Radio and Apache NiFi
It’s always been a frustrating experience for me, although in the case of GNU Radio and Apache NiFi that is probably largely due to lack of time with the tools. If I had more time to spend really learning how to use it properly an environment like NiFi would be rewarding. Even in the limited time I’ve spent with it I found it fairly easy to work with, it was just difficult to understand how to apply it effectively.
GNU Radio and NiFi are both pretty narrowly focused on their areas (DSP and DTL, respectively) and I think that is part of what makes them good tools. My guess would be that visual paradigms are probably pretty good for domain-specific tools where it is easier to define useful high level blocks, and not so good for general purpose coding where each individual component is fairly low level.
It’s also a bit annoying to have to navigate with the mouse constantly, but that’s probably more of a UI refinement issue than anything fundamental to visual tools.
Someone should do a visual programming tool with a VR headset so the code can be 3D and navigated with hand gestures. We could create new and perverse spaghetti code!