Wow, this comment got me really excited. I, too, have always wondered why programming has always been us programmers, sitting down in front of a text editor, writing tokens (def, if, = etc.).

It’s what got me working on Retool (https://tryretool.com). The idea is that visual programming has a bad rap, primarily because it’s being used in the wrong places. Most people try to apply visual programming to end-user software (Twitter, Airbnb, etc.). But because visual programming is really good for getting to an 80% solution in 20% of the time, and because 80% of Twitter really isn’t good enough (imagine Twitter with no autocomplete for tagging other users), building customer-facing software is precisely visual programming’s worst use case!

Retool’s focused specifically on building internal software. The idea is that, for internal software, 80% literally is 80%. And so visual programming is particularly suited for building internal stuff. Here’s a 4 minute demo video: https://vimeo.com/303811211. (People have described it as Delphi or Visual Basic in the cloud. In this case, the cloud is actually helpful, since it lets you distribute the created apps easily with authentication, authorization, and audit logs.)

If anybody has any feedback, or otherwise wants to hypothesize on why we’re still programming in text editors, please let me know! I’m david@.