I agree that visual programming can be great - my argument would be that starting from a model that we know works and making incremental steps towards something more visual is more likely to succeed, than attempting to jump all the way to something fully visual based
I'm a fan of what Observable is doing. Combine bubbles of classic code, with intermediate audio/visual output as you build up to full interactive infographics/demos.
Some types of code, hopefully less than more is just not very flow based and doesn't have a concrete visual representation.
in general I agree that incrementalism is the best way to improve a model. I'm just not certain how to do that with such a drastic change as going from textual to visual - but darklang seem to be doing a great job at that, and I do hope they succeed at their mission.
Thanks! We're very much of the opinion that we got into this mess we're in (gestures broadly) because everything has been incremental to date. That's how you get layers upon layers.
Yes 100% - my founding hypothesis was that because language progress so far has all been improvements on opcodes, that the idioms of programming are still based on the human catering to the computer rather than the other way around. It gets subtler over time, but we still have to, for example, emulate execution in our heads while coding, which is really really hard to learn.
