Visual Programming – Why It’s a Bad Idea
<i>Pros</i><p>The author well formulates the limitations of VPLs (Visual programming languages).<p><i>Cons</i><p>The rant seems to jumble in VPLs for general purpose programming with VPLs for domain-specific usecases. So although VPLs may be &quot;a bad idea&quot; for general purpose computing and does a good job of explaining its downsides, it is a little reckless in saying VPLs are a bad idea overall.<p>The author also offers two straw man arguments to make their point, though I don&#x27;t believe that these things are common misconceptions at all:<p>1) Abstraction and decoupling play a small and peripheral part in programming.<p>2) The tools that have been developed to support programming are unimportant.<p>Lastly, the author uses Scratch as its representative VPL example, even though it is probably the most far removed from &quot;Visual Programming&quot; and more in line with something I&#x27;d call &quot;Block-Based Programming&quot;. These are far from equivalent and a poor choice to use for talking about general purpose VPLs (though the author does admit that it may have been a poor choice later).