> Visual programming hasn't taken off because it isn't as good as text for the majority of use cases. This is borne out by more than 50 years of people writing computer programs.
...writing computer programs with text. this bias is massive because nearly no one writes visual programs. a lot of that is due to availability of visual environments, some of which are quite expensive (e.g., labview). most of it is due to bias.
if every single computer science and computer engineering major starts of their education with being taught "this (i.e., text) is how you program and interact with computers" then that sets up a massive bias that is nigh impossible to overcome. any study that does not address this bias is flawed. hence, we have people, who have never even programmed in a visual language, proclaiming visual programming doesn't work. i constantly hear text-based programmers say "oh, visual programming is good for niche things or trivial examples, but it doesn't scale", but yet i have developed large, complex applications with visual programming environments. you know why? because i treat it as real software. i modularize. i take data abstraction seriously. i accept the dataflow paradigm as the key paradigm and build things off of that.
and that leads me to another point. the dataflow paradigm does not map well to text-based languages at all, but it is a very powerful paradigm. visual programming languages are very good at the dataflow paradigm, and so from that alone, they seem to be required if we are to efficiently program dataflow-based systems.