[ken]

I see two camps here. Microsoft has been calling anything with a GUI "visual" for a few decades (Basic, Studio, C++, FoxPro, ...), so people from industry often use that definition. For people from academia, "visual" has a somewhat different meaning.

Thus, people in one camp see this as the standard name for the feature, and people in the other camp view it as misleading, and a continued diluting of the word in a way which trivializes their research.

After a decade of hearing "oh, visual programming, you mean like Visual C++?", I've learned to avoid the word entirely. It's a loaded term.

Every common word that is used as a popular brand name has this problem. I'm getting flashbacks to the 80's/90's and trying to explain my home computer to IBM PC people. "Do you have Windows?" "Well, it's an Apple. There are windows on the screen but it's not Microsoft Windows." "If you've got windows on the screen you can drag around with a mouse, that's Microsoft Windows."