[jerf]

I have a blog post in the $SOMEDAY pile where I warn about technologies that keep using the same example over and over again. If something is broadly applicable, people should be able to come up with independent examples of how it's useful. If the same example keeps coming up over and over, one should become suspicious that it only works on that example.

I observe that this style of programming only ever seems to be used for geometric programming of very visual things, or sometimes audio processing pipelines. I'm becoming suspicious that it may not be good for much of anything else. I'd be interested in seeing a mockup of how to use this technique for a JSON parser or a web handler or something and obtain any utility vs. what we already do.

I don't deny that it may be useful in a certain domain or potentially useful as an early teaching tool, but I remain highly skeptical that the promises/claims/demands that it be used for general-purpose programming is possible or a good idea, and the more I see the same examples over and over the deeper my skepticism becomes, no matter how slick the presentation.

[RodgerTheGreat]

The classic "hello world" for visual programming languages tends to be a Fahrenheit to Celsius converter. Not only is this example a very simple calculation, it happens to be a reversible, total function, which can often (unintentionally?) imply a degree of flexibility and interactivity which does not generalize to stateful or non-reversible programs.