Visual programming means anyone can be a coder

Isn't KISMET (http://www.unrealengine.com/features/kismet/) an example that there is a real need for that? Game scripts are definitely non-trivial, but they are not that complex either. Also, in the case of KISMET, the programming involved is flow-oriented, where visual representations might definitely give you more clarity.

> However to do anything even remotely large or complex with it you're still stuck with the same old problems of software development that the general public sucks at.

Except that bad LabView code takes spaghetti code to a whole new level: http://img.thedailywtf.com/images/201104/labview.jpg

I'm skeptical because I remember the RAD tools of the early 00s that were going to let businessmen program.

Oh, and who can forget the wonderful workflow systems that were all the rage soon after? There seemed to be a new one released every week.

I invite you to go try MS's WWF, that's 'visual'. What a nightmare that is.

They don't work. You need a programmer involved because edge cases rapidly become complicated and that's the hard bit, not visualizing a workflow. And these tools deprive you the programmer of the fine grained control you sorely need or worse generate code that's so hard to read and work with that it's faster coding from scratch even for amateurs.

I love Bret Victor's vision, but because of what it means for programmers, not the fuzzy 'creatives' in the article. I know some animation guys and yes, you can visually automate things like animation now, but logic flow? No.

Though I think we should keep trying.

I think that VB6 was probably one of the most productive programming environments ever, until a project grows larger than a couple of business rules. You cant deny the immediacy of dragging a text box, a button and some other controls onto a form and having an "instant" application to automate things.

I've used a variety of "visual" tools for designing everything from ETL tools to synthesizers. They are great for POC designs, but I generally find them difficult to use for the complex stuff. Configuration and properties and logic are much more suited to code in my very biased opinion. :)

I met with Bret Victor for lunch while visiting SF a few years ago and I specifically argued against visual programming languages making anyone able to program. I mean I know that some people are more inclined to think in blocks and visual metaphors (Hell most programmers draw out ideas constantly cause we do too) but any sufficient program eventually gets complicated enough that visual programming kind of breaks down unless it gets more and more abstract to make reusable components and modules that you can navigate too etc. I pushed at the time and I'm not even sure he remembers at this point but for augmenting text based programming and making what's happening more visual and real-time. Which seems to be some of the direction he's taking which is combining his great ideas in visualization with traditional text based programming environments. I was also a huge fan of Javascript as the lingua franca despite it's deficiencies because web based IDEs and examples were inherently so much more shareable than code you had to download and try (There could be ways around this such as a desktop repository of code viewer, but that's a friction point to people actually checking out demos/examples interactively ala JSBin as such.)

I'm personally loving what Kahn academy is doing that John Resig credits Bret Victor's talk on Inventing on Principle (http://vimeo.com/36579366) as a major inspiration. See article where he announces and explains their in browser interaction learning of CS course material: http://ejohn.org/blog/introducing-khan-cs/

In closing to name a view limitations of most visual programming languages: the naming problem (Most parts of your system need to be named in order to be able to talk about them), text based is stronger at this. Instantiation of reuseable code is pretty abstract to do visually. Eventually all programming gets complicated enough that text based approach really is easier to work with. Not to mention all the tools you can't leverage comparitvely to text based such as version control, REPLs, etc. I guess I think visual programming is idealized and people are spending all this time learning something that isn't as useful to know in the long term compared to traditional programming because all the important platforms have much richer support for text based programming (iOS, linux, C/C++ for games). But combining visualization of code execution is the perfect balance and would lead to basically replacing much commenting with an actual intuitive visualization of runtime complex structures/state. And definitely real time feedback of tuning /visual parameters is great. In the game industry all of this is very standard and I do feel there is a little more awe for his work than would be given by your typical graphics, art tool, or demo scene programming devs. Most game development toosl for say level editing and animation are all highly visual and real time interactive. Same goes for any serious AI dev they have debugging tools for visualizing all planning for entities communication, path planning, animation states, and more.

Anyway, just my thoughts. Still think Bret Victor is one of the most compelling thinkers in this space.