
Visual Programming – Why It’s a Bad Idea - phowat
http://mikehadlow.blogspot.com/2018/10/visual-programming-why-its-bad-idea.html
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PaulHoule
Bogus.

Scratch is good at what it is; I know people who swear by LabView, Alteryx and
similar tools rather than swearing at them.

One could make the case that current software development tools really aren't
good enough and that one fundamental problem is dealing with naming and
polysemy.

The trouble fundamentally is that there is no system that is going to produce
ergonomic names for everything. There are systems that can name everything but
the names look like

84746261718

or

178bcd0d-70ce-413b-9497-5364a5f56972

which people can't remember or easily discover. Part of the appeal of GUIs is
that you can pick something out of a palette, list, or menu although the gain
you get there is limited. Ever see a 1000+ page book on Microsoft Word or
(worse) try to explain to somebody how to use mobile apps for the first time
(eg. "click on the hamburger icon; huh?", "swipe down; ... doesn't work ...;
maybe when you swipe down you have to start above the edge of the screen...")
and you realize that there are limits to how many things you can present on a
screen and how well people can find things.

When you are talking to people you can use a word which is ambiguous and
people figure it out most of the time and if they don't figure it out you can
have a conversation with them about it as opposed to a programming language
compiler which typically give messages like:

Could not find or construct Composite[CustomDataType]. [error] [error] If
CustomDataType is a simple type (or option thereof) that maps to a single
column, you're [error] probably missing a Meta instance. If CustomDataType is
a product type (typically a case class, [error] tuple, or HList) then probably
one of its component types is missing a Composite instance. You can [error]
usually diagnose this by evaluating Composite[Foo] for each element Foo of the
product type in [error] question. See the FAQ in the Book of Doobie for more
hints.

Until we accept that we can do fundamentally better and that we must we are
going to be stuck having the same stupid conversations.

