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Comment by collyw | Hacker News Reader

The only thing that visual programming solves is the syntax element. At the end of the day that is actually one of the easiest parts of programming. Understanding your data structures and relationships can't be solved any more easily through GUI interfaces.

Guis work well for interactive stuff, but not for scripting things.

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Visual programming vs textual programming is like video vs transcript. You can read the transcript of a video a lot faster than watching a video. You can not say that video is superior because it simplifies orthography and grammar issues.

There's a reason why people draw in photoshop instead of typing the values of pixels in an array.

I think the biggest problem with textual programming isn't the text per se, but that text is used as the underlying format. I'd rather have projections of an abstract syntax tree that I could manipulate as text with different types of syntax or as various visual objects when that would be more useful.

Frankly, I never understood this objection; what's the problem with using text as the stored format? You can still parse it to an AST, render it in a visual way and then serialize the AST back to text.

I think the main issue is that code syntax is too flexible, so code generation tools create large diffs when updating manually written code. A simple solution to that is having a formatting tool like "go fmt" to adjust the latter before committing.

At the end of the day, text is just an intermediate format that we understand. Its all stored in a binary representation.

Yes, I agree. Text is too flexible (allowing you to do clever things you couldn't do in a drop down menu). A drop down menu won't allow you to make the same mistakes that a text option will, but is way less flexible.

Flow and rhythm are a thing in progrsmming, which is why structured editing continues to feel "stilted" to many people. Heck, many people don't even like static typing for similar reasons...without heavy doses of inference, it forces you to write your code in a certain order or suffer from a bunch of distracting spurious tyoe errors.

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