I'm skeptical of visual programming, especially the most obvious 'blocks instead of text syntax' type. Spreadsheets use a formal, text-based language -- and end users learn spreadsheets fine!
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Our tools for editing text are pretty good; also, our hardware (keyboards, high-dpi displays) is adapted to it, so it might be a local maximum it's also great that you can edit text 'out of order' & go through invalid states while getting to your ultimate correct program
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Rather than blindly getting rid of text, make the right formal language and representation for the user's interests. People can be _great_ at learning languages: there's no reason a formal or textual language has to be 'programming' with all its connotationspic.twitter.com/Ud8WByxnX8
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related is Bret's 'show the data'; block-based 'visual' programming is about showing (the same old) code as blocks, not about 1. showing the data or 2. having a better code for users' interestspic.twitter.com/4eEu4X6Su6
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also, from the mundane engineering perspective, it's an incredible pain to build a visual environment, compared to just writing a compiler or interpreter routine. huge state space and input space + lots of UI code -> harder to iterate and prototype tool ideas
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Having no issues of scope or control in nearly all spreadsheet formulas would seem to reduce the burden on the end-user programmer vs. general purpose programming languages.
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Eliminating scope and control issues would also factor into the apparent success of "rule-based end-user programming" as well.
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