Maybe visual programming is the answer, maybe not
These issues are <i>old</i>.<p>- Large programs &#x2F; graphs?  I can browse maps and photos of the entire planet from my web browser.  ZUIs are well understood now.  Also, computers got really big and fast.  My graphics card has 8 GB (!) of RAM.  Find a VPL that was designed for the era where graphics are cheap.<p>- Automatic layout is hard?  Yes, an optimal solution to graph layout is NP-complete, but so is register allocation, and my compiler still works (and that isn&#x27;t even its bottleneck).  There&#x27;s plenty of cheap approximations that are 99% as good.<p>- No formal spec?  They sound desperate to come up with excuses why something can&#x27;t work.  How many (textual) programming languages had a formal spec before they got popular?  I tried to look up when Ruby got a formal BNF grammar, for comparison, and it seems the answer in 2020 is still &quot;nope, whatever parse.y does (13,000+ lines of C), that&#x27;s Ruby&quot;.<p>- Difficulty to create editors?  This is a legitimate concern, as it&#x27;s true &quot;there are no general purpose Visual Language editors&quot;, but that&#x27;s an economic issue, not a technical one.  Plain text is one of the very few formats where we have general-purpose editors.  In most areas of computing, profitability has taken over, and companies refuse to cooperate.  There&#x27;s no one word processing or spreadsheet or database format, either.<p>- Lack of evidence?  Again, they&#x27;re holding VPLs to a higher standard.  When a language like Ruby appeared, nobody asked for proof.  Simply creating something that some programmers liked was sufficient.<p>- Poor representation?  That&#x27;s an issue with all kinds of programs!  If I had a nickel for every horribly written program I&#x27;ve had to deal with in my life...<p>- Lack of portability?  This is another symptom of the editor problem, above.  Make a standard file format, and actually figure out how to get people to use it, and there&#x27;s no problem.<p>These issues are from an article written in the 1980&#x27;s.  The same day as its publication, Apple released the Macintosh IIci, with a 40 or 80 MB hard disk, 1 or 4 MB of RAM, and a 640x480 pixel display.  (For all that computing power, the starting price was $6269 -- only slightly less than the $6615 starting price for a Honda Civic that year.)  Clearly, visual programming was a non-starter in that day and age.  So were 90% of the other things I do on my computer every day.  That doesn&#x27;t mean they&#x27;re bad ideas.<p>If you&#x27;d have asked me to write down a list of issues with C++ in 1989, I&#x27;d have a list that was similarly useless in 2020.