While I agree that text might not be the best way to represent a program, text files have many convenient properties that make them hard to replace:
- Simplicity: every computer and most humans can interptet it without any issues
- Diffing: it's relatively easy to tell what changed in a text file between revisions
- Editing tools: text editors, formatters, etc. exist and many people know how to use them efficiently
Also, modern developer setups allow you to manipulate code as a syntax tree (see tree-sitter text-objects) and intellisense and snipping tools allow you to type much less.
This seems more like a matter of having more tooling because 99.999% of programming has been text based.
If we spent the time building tools for visual coding it’s possible we’d be able to do way more.
Just thinking about diffing for example, it would be much easier to see which nodes have changes in the whole codebase by just highlighting them red. It’d be easier also to depict something like “the flow for this process changes from this to this”
Author here.
Diffing is a great example. The first incarnation of Flyde had naive version control built into it and had such diff features!
Diffing from VSCode already makes a bit of sense (see https://imgur.com/a/WXj89tx). Next step is to color it differently, and finally, add a browser extension to render diffs nicely from GitHub/Gitlab's UI as well :)
- Simplicity: every computer and most humans can interptet it without any issues
- Diffing: it's relatively easy to tell what changed in a text file between revisions
- Editing tools: text editors, formatters, etc. exist and many people know how to use them efficiently
Also, modern developer setups allow you to manipulate code as a syntax tree (see tree-sitter text-objects) and intellisense and snipping tools allow you to type much less.