Ask HN: Why does visual programming suck?

Graphical programming also walks away from a huge body of work dedicated to managing, searching, and manipulating text. As good as the graphical tools can be, there's nothing like all the work that's gone into text editors, diff tools, query languages, etc. These are all things that are central parts of my programming workflow, and they are all missing or considerably weaker in a graphical language. (This is not to mention the fact that graphical programming gives up two hands and ten fingers as input devices in favor of one hand pointing and clicking with a mouse.)

I think as appealing as the idea is, whatever benefits there are don't outweigh the considerable costs.

Because pictures are helpful, but neither necessary, nor, in most cases, sufficient. Just look at the use of pictures in science and technology generally (e.g. circuit schematics, Feynman diagrams), and try to imagine understanding what is being presented without reading the words.

I have seen examples where pictures can help a lot (I am thinking of a pictorial demonstration of the Pythagorean theorem, for example), but I am not aware of a constrained pictorial formalism that is both general and expressive enough to do the job of a programming language (directed graphs may be general enough, but are not expressive enough; when extended to fix this, they lose the generality.)

>The complete dismissal of visual programming by text-based programmers is often infuriating.

I, for one, would be thrilled to see an example that actually works. Arguments that it should work don't count for much, otherwise.

There are some hybrids that are pretty useful in their areas of applicability, such as state transition networks, dataflow models and Petri nets (note that these three examples are all annotated directed graphs.)

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f5o4tIz2Zzc

If we use text for specific and visual for abstraction, we still need to maintain both and there are no effective tools to do that without creating additional work.

Then one day someone published an article explaining that we need words to represent variables, doing it visually runs out of abstractions too quickly to do anything useful.

There were no journal publications after.

It's been about 14 years since I last looked at these publications and my memory is foggy. The point is that any useful program is too complicated to represent with pictures.