Visual Programming Is Unbelievable (2015)
IMO, Visual programming does not have a proper definition yet. Coding frontend and coding backend are altogether two different things and sometimes users confuse the application of visual authoring (programming) in one area with the other.<p>But I believe it is the future. I bet you won&#x27;t be carrying your laptop, enslaved by the physical keyboard, which is necessary for traditional &#x27;coding&#x27; with you in 2030. You would be dragging and dropping stuff, perhaps in Virtual reality headset or through voice or gesture to build what you want, just like you would author in a visual platform like Adobe illustrator or in a 3d authoring tool.<p>Visual programming have it&#x27;s own strength and weaknesses. For e.g. Creating algorithms from scratch in a Visual programming is not very productive (yet), but authoring business logic is highly effective in Visual programming. How many times, as a regular programmer you have had to write an algorithm? Most often it&#x27;s just business logic that we tag under the category of an algorithm, which is not right. Algorithms are very generic piece of logic and business logic applies to your own problem&#x2F;data specifically. If you have a closer look you realize that we are simply reusing algorithms or modules (created by a smaller group of people comparatively) to build the rules&#x2F;business logic. What we do is mostly write glue code. we don&#x27;t really need to code for that.<p>There are tons of examples for highly successful application of visual programming. But as an average web developer you never get to see that. Reason - Visual authoring tools are highly expensive and hence are confined to fortune 500 companies. That along with lack of quality open source implementations are the reason for visual programming to never take off among general web programming community. Even the newer generation ones like Treeline (for backend) and Bubble.is (frontend) are also closed source. NoFlo is open source and it almost started to create some buzz, but the team got sidetracked apparently, and they are using dataflow method for authoring frontend which is a highly inefficient.<p>You want to see successful application of Visual programming in real life? Ever heard of Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) ? Business Process Automation (BPMN&#x2F;BPEL) ? Extract Transform and Load (ETL)? They all employ Visual programming to a great extend and are multi-billion dollar businesses. Do a google image search of following, in no particular order.<p>Dell bhoomi (EAI)<p>Tibco Business Works (EAI)<p>Snaplogic (Founded by Informatica ex. CEO) (EAI)<p>MuleESB&#x2F;Anypoint studio (EAI)<p>Oracle BPEL (Business process automation)<p>Tibco iProcess (Business process automation)<p>Mendix (Web app development)<p>Webratio (Web app development)<p>(+lots of others if you dig out)