The trick is that you don't round trip. You choose one immutable data structure that captures both the textual source of the program and the semantic information captured by the parser at the same time.
That doesn't solve anything. The problem isn't how to represent the AST, but defining both a visual and textual version that can unambiguously represent the same thing without either or both representational becoming unusable.
Right. I think it's already a solved problem though. HTML and the HTML DOM are a living solution to that exact problem. All that we have to do is take the patterns used to power general UI and develop a DOM for code.
Now consider I have a visual programming version representing that expression, and I want to ask someones opinion about it on Slack. Unless your visual programming environment has a solution for how I can post that to Slack, and have others respond with tweaked versions, it's a non-starter.
Once you've solved Slack - maybe with a plugin -, you need to solve all our e-mail clients, and you need to solve Google Docs and Word for when we write documentation, and a multitude of other tools.
You might be able to get part of the way there with a browser plugin, but you'll still have a wide variety of other tools and platforms to cover.
Your assumption is that visual programming and textual programming are disjoint, but I have not observed this to be true (necessarily). Being able to edit a program in a semantic fashion does not preclude its having syntax. I don't see syntax as a boondoggle to be eliminated, but rather the highest-bandwidth way we know how to convey information!
I think you're right that the end game of any successful attempt at standardization is integration with all those tools like Outlook, Slack, Discord, Signal, Word, Docs, Notion... The list goes on and on. It's strange how the presence or absence of political momentum behind a standard could change that from being "basically impossible" to "basically inevitable"
I've assumed nothing of the sort, nor have I argued for syntax to be eliminated. Both wildly misrepresent what I've argued.
On the contrary you will find that throughout this thread my biggest issue with visual programming is the reverse:
That a textual syntax that maps cleanly to the visual representation is an absolute necessity.
The problem is no visual programming system has included such a system. They've either been only visual, or they've been visual representations of programs written in classical programming languages.
Nobody has come up with, e.g. a language designed specifically to facilitate new visual programming capabilities without losing the ability to cleanly roundtrip to text.
I tried and gave up. Maybe I'll revisit it again in retirement, but I really hope someone beats me to it and finds something that works.
