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by progre 1534 days ago
As someone who has done thousands of hours of programming in a visual language (IAR Visual State), I hate it. The promise of an easy visual overview quickly drowns in a sea of edge cases.

A picture says a thousand words, sure, but precicely what those words are turns out to be important. We use text for programming because it allows us to express ourselves unambigously.

I sure would like to see more visual representations of text programs though, this seems like the best of both worlds to me.

1 comments

I've also had clients that used Simulink/StateFlow modeling for embedded state machines and to me it works up to a certain degree of complexity.

It works really well for a quick prototype, but for anything more envolved I find the cognitive fatigue of a complex visual model is much greater than keeping a mental model and looking at a narrow scope piece of text.