Folk wisdom on visual programming
I worked on a visual programming tool from the late 90s to the early 2000s. The same problems apply then as they do now.There's an unwinnable war between keeping things simple and being complex-enough to do useful things. Visual stuff is great for simple things, but simple things aren't very useful. When you really need to do more complex things, you reach a limit very quickly. It becomes pretty unmaintainable very quickly and then people will "graduate" from it and go to something more convenient.My kid is learning Scratch right now, and it's taught him a lot of great stuff. But after about a year, he's ready to move onto Python. Scratch has taught him some very valuable concepts and he was able to jump into some Python concepts with ease (others still escape him). But you can only go so far with Scratch vs other programming languages.The same goes for other visual tools. In the end, people graduate from the visual style because it ironically becomes too complex because they want to keep things simple, and then you've lost a customer.