Ask HN: Why isn’t visual programming a bigger thing?
Symbols are pictures too; and they have denser meaning than diagrammatic pictures.<p>It&#x27;s not that difficult concepts are easier in visual form. It&#x27;s that concepts are verbosely described in visual form. Verbosity puts a ceiling on abstraction and makes things explicit, which is why things seem simple for people to whom everything is new (experts, on the other hand, find it harder to see the wood for the collection of tall leafy deciduous plants).<p>When you need abstraction, you need to compress your representation. You need to replace something big with something small. You replace a big diagram with a reference. It has a name.<p>Gradually you reinvent symbolic representation in your visual domain.<p>Visual programming excels in domains that don&#x27;t need that level of abstraction, that can live with the complexity ceiling. The biggest win is when the output is visual, when you can get WYSIWYG synergies to shorten the conceptual distance between the visual program and the execution.<p>Visual programming is at its worst when you need to programmatically maniplate the construction of programs. What&#x27;s the use of building all your database tables in a GUI when you need to construct tables programmatically - you can&#x27;t script your GUI to do that, you need to learn a new paradigm, whether it&#x27;s SQL DDL or some more structured construction. So now you&#x27;ve doubled what you need to know, and things aren&#x27;t so simple.