>So what makes Visual Programming not have a textual representation? What makes them inherently incompatible with each other?
Nothing really, but you would need a Visual programming environment that maps one to one to your language. So that you could switch between coding in code and looking at or modifying the visual representation when it's helpful.
This would probably limit what you can do in the GUI, just as GraphViz limits control of the graph in favor of automatic layouting.
The vendor lock-in is one of the main issues I mentioned above.
If you have a good idea how to visually represent and modify C# or some other language I wouldn't mind that as an additional tool. I would think it's even very helpful for getting an overview. However the code should still be the master. And open-source is probably the only way to have such a tool that's actually good.
And if you can map one language to the GUI you could probably port this to many languages.
I was mostly concerned with what we have right now (LabView, Simulink and others).
Nothing really, but you would need a Visual programming environment that maps one to one to your language. So that you could switch between coding in code and looking at or modifying the visual representation when it's helpful.
This would probably limit what you can do in the GUI, just as GraphViz limits control of the graph in favor of automatic layouting.
The vendor lock-in is one of the main issues I mentioned above.
If you have a good idea how to visually represent and modify C# or some other language I wouldn't mind that as an additional tool. I would think it's even very helpful for getting an overview. However the code should still be the master. And open-source is probably the only way to have such a tool that's actually good.
And if you can map one language to the GUI you could probably port this to many languages.
I was mostly concerned with what we have right now (LabView, Simulink and others).