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Most professional programmers will be continually abstracting and decoupling code. All the type systems and apparatus of object-oriented and functional programming is really just an effort to get this complexity under control. Most of the innovation in programming languages is an attempt to manage complexity, most commonly via abstraction, encapsulation and decoupling.
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They find that it’s very hard to reason about a large procedural code base and often struggle to produce stable and efficient software at scale. However, once a program gets larger than a quite trivial example, the complexity soon overwhelms the novice programmer. Indeed, this is how most novice programmers imagine that software works. Visual programming makes the assumption that most programs are simple procedural sequences, somewhat like a flowchart. Which bring us to the second misconception, that abstraction and decoupling are peripheral concerns. There’s an impedance mismatch between the visual ‘code’ and the textual code, and the programmer has to navigate the interface between the two, often spending more effort on conforming to the needs of the graphical programming tool than solving the problem at hand. Visual elements can’t be created except by experienced programmers, or understood except by reading their underlying code, so most of the supposed advantages of the visual representation are lost. The properly dialogues are usually sub-standard development environments and enforce a particular choice of language, usually a scripting language of some kind. Now we have the worst of both worlds, textual programming unsupported by modern tooling. The visual elements themselves only represent the very highest level of program flow and the majority of the work is now done in standard textual code hidden in the boxes.
It becomes ‘property dialogue programming’. The problem is that this code needs to be defined somewhere. Visual workflow tools are a particular culprit here. The solution for most visual programming languages is to make the ‘blocks’ represent more complex operations so that each visual element is equivalent to a large block of textual code. The effort to mentally parse such a complex picture is often far harder than reading the equivalent text. If you do this it soon becomes apparent that a single line of code often maps to several boxes and since it’s not untypical for even a simple program to contain hundreds of lines of code, this translates into hundreds or even thousands of graphical elements. I expect this misconception comes from a failure to actually read a typical program written in a standard textual programming language and imagine it transformed into graphical elements of boxes and arrows. The idea is that programming is actually quite simple and if we could only present it in a clear graphical format it would dramatically lower the learning curve and mental effort required to create and read software. The popularity of Scratch among educationalists plays to this misconception. The first misconception holds that software development has significant barriers to entry because textual programming languages obfuscate the true nature of programming.
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I’ve added an update section to the end of this post to address some of the main criticisms.Ī visual programming language is one that allows the programmer to create programs by manipulating graphical elements rather than typing textual commands. This post had a great response on Reddit with over 300 comments.