[khooke]

I think the limitation that no-one has managed to solve is that visual programming paradigm approaches tend to focus on solving a specific type of problem (drag and drop GUI builders are a perfect example), and this means their usage is narrow and they're never been widely adopted. Building a generic visual programming tool that can be used to solve any type of business problem across any business domain is very difficult if not dare I say it impossible.

[smolder]

I see it as just a very difficult problem. Flip the problem around and you can maybe see my point of view. IDEs for text programming are getting more intelligent, to the point where in certain languages, arranging function calls and assigning parameters could almost be done completely with autocomplete menus. Go a few steps further and you can connect these things without the frequent naming-of-things exercise that programmers undergo.

Part of the reason I am so bullish on visual programming is that it lets us skip the excessive naming-of-things that is part of text programming. I would rather copy-paste a pile of colors and shapes that describes an algorithm and connect it to the right inputs and outputs. I think nameless shapes would be more immediately recognizable than identifiers from all the various naming schemes people use in their code.