[bccdee]

> Without diffs, without analysis, we are going nowhere fast.

The victory of plaintext coding over visual programming is another example of worse is better. Semantic, language-aware diffs exist, but I see them much less frequently than dumb plaintext diffs. Intelligent code search exists, but in many cases grep is just as good. IDEs come with very advanced refactoring tools, but I still prefer to refactor using vim macros.

When we write code in plaintext, we're expressing our code in a lower level of abstraction with really great tooling. Doesn't matter if it's java or yaml or something custom—plaintext tools work on all of them. Visual programming languages can't do this. There's no language-agnostic vim or git for visual programming. Even if we wanted to invent sort of unified language-agnostic visual programming abstraction, the ecosystem isn't there, and there's no guarantee it'd get adopted.

So I think plaintext will remain king for the foreseeable future. Visual tools have to use human-readable, human-editable plaintext as their source of truth, if they want to succeed.

[datavirtue]

I think of it like comparing cuniform and hieroglyphs to phonetic alphabets.

The pictures are easier to learn and use but they are not as expressive and precise as the more abstract text. Text is a marvelous innovation. The fact that most people on the planet can communicate complex ideas and emotions as well as program machines with it (in many different dialects) is mind blowing.

Using pictures to program feels like a regression.

[lhamil64]

I work with a few proprietary languages and many tools don't have semantic information but it's still tolerable as plain text. I suspect I'd be stuck using awful tools if these were visual languages.