Most visual programming environments fail to get any usage. Why? They try to replace code syntax and business logic but developers never try to visualize that. Instead, developers visualize state transitions, memory layouts, or network requests.
In my opinion, those working on visual programming would be more likely to succeed if they started with aspects of software that developers already visualize.
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Developers say they want “visual programming”, which makes you think “oh, let’s replace
ifandfor”. But nobody ever made a flow chart to readfor (i in 0..10) if even?(i) print(i). Developers familiar with code already like and understand textual representations to read and write business logic2.Let’s observe what developers do, not what they say.
Developers do spend the time to visualize aspects of their code but rarely the logic itself. They visualize other aspects of their software that are important, implicit, and hard to understand.
Here are some visualizations that I encounter often in serious contexts of use:
- Various ways to visualize the codebase overall.
- Diagrams that show how computers are connected in a network
- Diagrams that show how data is laid out in memory
- Transition diagrams for state machines.
- Swimlane diagrams for request / response protocols.
This is the visual programming developers are asking for. Developers need help with those problems and they resort to visuals to tackle them.
The best implementation of this that I have seen has been Frends Integration platform (https://frends.com). We use it at work, and have implemented ~500 business and integration processes with it.
This kind of visual programming works well in close to business logic implementations, were it is important to be able to quickly understand the business need behind the process.
How Frends work on the background, it compiles the visual process to C# code, so it is actually quite fast. Many solutions interpreters the process flow while executing, which makes them much slower.
My background is in normal code development, and I still think that there is a place for that. I have always hated having the raw business process in code, because those tend to change, and reimplementing code because process changes, is always really annoying.