My experience: a few years of (intermittent) work with webMethods Flow Services (which is "Visual").
Conclusions: text-based programming allows you to:
- grep for all files where you used "Inc x".
- use diff to compare two or more versions of the same module
- comments are easily integrated with "code".
None of this is true for Visual programming.
Also, in my experience even if you are "visually arranging blocks" and "connecting these with arrows" in reality a lot of properties or parameters to the blocks themselves are specified by manipulating strings and numbers.
Except that those cannot reliably be grepped or diffed...
Well, I'll just say that a graph is not bad datastruct for diffing and versioning [1].
The other problems may be true for now but also seem pretty low-hanging fruit?
I do not understand if you have actual practical experience with medium-complexity projects with visual languages.
Also, wM have been around for more then 10 years now. I am not using it anymore but I have colleagues who do. The "low hanging fruit" stays unpicked, so maybe it is not so easy to provide the things I listed?
From the end-user perspective, you are likely correct. I was musing with my PL designer hat on. The difficulty is the huge amount of work that has gone into the entire unix way or developing software. That's the seductive local minimum.
My experience: a few years of (intermittent) work with webMethods Flow Services (which is "Visual").
Conclusions: text-based programming allows you to:
- grep for all files where you used "Inc x".
- use diff to compare two or more versions of the same module
- comments are easily integrated with "code".
None of this is true for Visual programming.
Also, in my experience even if you are "visually arranging blocks" and "connecting these with arrows" in reality a lot of properties or parameters to the blocks themselves are specified by manipulating strings and numbers.
Except that those cannot reliably be grepped or diffed...