[alephr]

How do you navigate code now? Do you walk through code line by line or do you search or use some kind of navigation that relies on the structure of code?

I agree that a concrete product is probably going to be required to convince people who aren't good at thinking outside of what already exists, but these kinds of comparisons just feel absurd. Maybe a better way to think about this sort of thing is "how can the structure of code be used to simplify and improve working with it"; the term visual programming is just too loaded in negative ways.

Edit: I don't mean to sound insulting when I talk about thinking outside of what exists. It's not always an easy thing to do. But it becomes an issue when you it causes you to let previous attempts narrow your views on what something is.

Visual programming doesn't have to be, say, exactly what's scratch is today. It doesn't even have to be close. The two keys IMO are utilizing the structure of code as well as the inherent visual processing power humans have.

This doesn't mean no text, it means expanding how we think about operating on and viewing code in a way that makes it easier (and thus more productive) to do.

[afarrell]

Okay. I'm on board with you there. I suspect that SQL or data-model rendering would be the easiest place to start there--allowing you to auto-generate a visualisation from SQL. If that got widespread enough, then it would become a standard way of representing the data that is currently represented by text. That means you can build interactions on top of that understanding.