It's a good onramp to building a programmatic intuition, but you're correct that it very quickly gets left behind once the 'magic' is understood. If you do a quick image search for , e.g. Rhino3D Grasshopper, Blender Geometry Nodes, Vectorworks Marionette, Autodesk Dynamo, ComfyUI, you'll quickly see the implementations of the real world procedures users are crafting become unwieldy rather fast.

I can't tell you why an 80 column wall of characters is easier to reason about than a visual graph, but I assume it has something to do with the reason Mitch Hedberg does not like arrows[0]; look, a function.. let's got that way.

[0] https://youtu.be/EI1DBRz3JLk?si=DCLNkbeCGWyw-Ceu

I don't think this is for people that would just write code. Maybe you need that pressure release to get some edge cases, but for the most part, if you're using a visual programming tool, you are trying to avoid the code part for some reason.

So, I don't see that limit as something that's all that bad.

Should we call this luciana1u's law?

If BizTalk has it, why shouldn't my visual programming tool have it?

and then the evolution of the whole tool slows down as the answer for most limitations in native functions becomes "just use the 'code node' and write the function there" :)

as someone who writes code, examples 2/3 are non-intuitive

(maybe more context would help)

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I often enjoy walks in the woods, far away from the systems for supporting tonemaxxers. It is good for my health but even but better for my mind.

I wonder if apps like Boostcamp implement their plans in a language like this

> It can become a complete coding platform.

... everything evolves until it can read mail^H^H^H becomes Turing complete?

Technically, it seems to have three different paradigms that it exposes:

> Procedural/Event-based/Declarative - These three snippets achieve the same thing in different ways. One repeatedly asks the button if it is pressed; one tells the button to control the LED; and one tells the LED to follow the button's state.

Much of the article seems to focus on the latter "Declarative" way, which they created a Node-RED-like UI for, which is indeed flow-based. But other approaches seemingly can be used too :)

Houdini (VFX/3D tool), virtually unchallenged in some of its domains, it's basically visual programming. Very basic what you'd do inside of Houdini when working with it (with screenshots): https://www.sidefx.com/docs/houdini/basics/intro.html

Unreal Engine also have "Blueprints" for game logic that remains fairly popular, maybe not always as the underlying systems, but at least as a control surface for game designers, like a "API" kind of.

If you're curious how out of control and wacky these sort of graphs can get, https://blueprintsfromhell.tumblr.com/ has a bunch of fun examples.

The video game industry is built arround that, game engines use that model all the time as gameplay scripting.

https://dev.epicgames.com/documentation/unreal-engine/bluepr...

Simulink, Labview, Bosch ASCET are all pervasive in control systems engineering, especially in European automotive applications.

I don't know, "node-based" interfaces as a concept seem to have made inroads into quite a number of (specialized) fields, e.g. image processing or movie postproduction.

My takeaway is that simply visualizing the AST of a procedural language doesn't do much in reducing the complexity and just makes it harder to read or edit long programs.

In contrast, visualizing data flow graphs can have real utility.

Also, the general question is who is the target audience: It seems pretty obvious to me that programmers who live and breathe code wouldn't be very enthusiastic about visual programming. But that might be different for other professions that don't have that kind of coding expertise.

Also, a lot of programming skill is about keeping the logical abstractions and runtime state in your head that your code will create - not so much reading what is on the screen. That's far easier if you have written the code yourself than if you have to get familiar with existing code.

Thanks to agents, the second case is becoming the dominating situation now, so clever visualizations that help you make sense of existing code and its runtime state might be in demand in the future.

I think PLCs are programmed using a mix of text and visuals. Or at least that's what I remember from uni. I'm not entirely sure why that is. I suppose it makes it a lot more obvious to your coworkers and management when you make spaghetti code, which I suppose can create pressure to not make a total mess of things.

Blender shaders maybe?

yeah Visual Basic 6, kind of a different thing but clicking on things to select the method etc is very similar

node-RED for PLC programming

scratch, thats super popular, but aimed at kids.

GNU Radio?