[AlexDanger]

Certainly a medium post would be good - I'm impressed by your pivots trying to find a fit with the visual programming paradigm.

What is your opinion on visual programming and diagramming libraries? Would you recommend particular libraries/services for visual programming if looking to build this type of UX/UI into a new product?

I'm interested in building a service that utilises a basic visual programming interface but I have no interest in building out a complex visual programming / diagramming UI toolset myself.

Do you consider the visual programming aspect a commodity or a selling feature? Or is that dependent on the market you are selling into?

[narrationbox]

There is a range of what goes for "visual programming" these days. If you can tell me what market you are trying to target I can give you a better idea of things (or email if you don't want post it here). A lot of visual programming-esque products are not obvious visual programming systems but use the same underlying designs and patterns. E.g. take Lobe AI (acquired by Microsoft and their features are now in Azure Machine Learning), their neural network pipelines are quite far from your LabView style imperative control structures but the underlying data flow across nodes linked by splines UI pattern is something that has been replicated across generations of game engines and other design software. Zapier, GitHub Actions, Retool. Many a unicorn has visual programming as a central part of their product. However, they are not advertised as such, you do not see the same marketing language as Scratch or Simulink. If you look at Trigger Finance or IFTTT, the word programming never comes up. From a business/marketing point of view, it is probably for best not to use the word "programming" to describe your product or UI (unless it is educational software of sorts). Excel is fairly successful but most users do not really consider it to be "programming" even though it essentially is.

Building a visual programming language in 2020 is fairly trivial and straightforward if your environment is the browser. There is a ton of libraries and open source reference projects out there: Xod, n8n, Makecode, Rete.js, Blockly. On the engineering side, as long as you do not try to map a mainstream programming language with its associated frameworks directly into visual programming, one-to-one on the syntax level, but instead build wrappers and simplified interfaces around it then it should work out pretty well.