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by contextfree 5630 days ago
Having the word "visual" in the name doesn't make it visual.
1 comments

Right. To be truly visual a language must also provide a bunch of widgets that you drag and drop to build graphical user interfaces. Oh wait...
A text-based language with a GUI designer tool = a text-based language plus a GUI designer tool. It doesn't = a visual language.

I guess MSFT did take a stab at something closer to an actual visual language in Visual Studio, in the form of the Workflow Foundation designer.

I admit Visual Basic is not near as cool as say Scratch, but it is pretty visual, especially when compared to BASIC. I think it was fair for Microsoft to use the term, some 20 years ago, given that visual languages at that time were called dataflow languages. Now, had they called it Dataflow Basic, I would have been pissed.