[kpil]

I wholeheartedly agree to almost everything you say and especially that everyone is probably able to learn some programming in a suitable language, just as they can learn to read and do math - and it would be good for them if it was taught well, if not because it gives you a tool for solving problems that you might not otherwise acquire. But I am certain that not all, or perhaps not even the majority, have the skills required to pursue a professional career.

I doubt however, that there is much to gain from simplifying the languages, and especially not by going the graphical programming route - it's a chimera occluding the actual problems.

Graphic programming could be used as learning tool, just like a set of training wheels, but just as them it would eventually become a hindrance as both make simple problems simple and everything else much more complex or virtually impossible.

The tools and languages can be improved of course but I do not think there will be any ground breaking improvements, just like there probably will not be any ground breaking simplifications in mathematics, or the process of learning it.

As an side note, I personally wonder why not more work have been done in incorporating first class support for entity-relation and/or graphs in languages - which is probably useful when modeling actual real world problems. But as it is still possible to build using generic language constructs, no one seems to care.

Or maybe the problem is that the educational system is so bad that too many are actually struggling to not topple over with their bicycle even after some years in university.

[DonaldFisk]

> Graphic programming could be used as learning tool, just like a set of training wheels, but just as them it would eventually become a hindrance as both make simple problems simple and everything else much more complex or virtually impossible.

For visual languages such as Squeak, and Skov, the idea is indeed to make programming easier for people.

However, visual programming has another important raison d'être. MIMD programs algorithms are more naturally expressed as dataflow, so that task scheduling and load-balancing become almost trivial, and dataflow is more naturally expressed graphically.

Now we have multicore machines and it is difficult to make optimal use of resources with mainstream imperative programming languages.

Graphs are, as you point out, a very flexible data structure, and there ought to be something to be gained in representing programs as graphs, and having programs operate on graphs. Lisp and Prolog benefit from homoiconicity.

[sjayasinghe]

Developers who've significant experience with functional programming understand that it would be easier and more reliable to solve many (or most) problems using a functional language over an imperative one. But the majority of developers have little to no experience with functional programming. In almost every conceivable way widespread adoption of functional programming would make everyones jobs significantly better. And these days we are beginning to see mainstream imperative languages starting to incorporate functional concepts slowly because people are starting to realize the value of it.

Right now we have far superior tools available to us than the ones used by the average programmer, but due to a combination of historical reasons, poor education, and sheer inertia of past commitment to inferior tools, we don't yet see widespread adoption of the superior tools that are already available.

The visual languages that I've seen so far are a kind of adaptation of existing languages to make them simpler and more accessible to beginners. What I'm talking about is not merely simplification of existing languages, but more a shift to an entirely different kind of paradigm. A shift that would require the development of new abstractions that are uniquely suited for visual programming that are not just adaptations of existing abstractions.

But as with all tools there are limitations. Certainly visual languages will not be best tool for all jobs, but there are certain classes of problems that are going to be easier to tackle with a visual language. There is also the possibility of solving a particular problem (or different parts of the problem) with both visual and text-based programming concurrently. First class support for data structures like graphs are easier to do with a visual language. I use Neo4j for graphs and the cypher query language is quite good, but it's effectiveness comes from the fact that it incorporates visual elements within the text. Something like MATCH (n)-[:REL]->(y) is a query for matching a part of the graph but you're still limited by the one dimensional structure of the language. You could imagine a visual query language for graphs being vastly more powerful in ways that a text based language couldn't possibly be.