DRAKON is one of my favorite old-time visual programming languages. There's a lot more information on the Russian Wikipedia page, including an astounding 225 references: <a href="https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%94%D0%A0%D0%90%D0%9A%D0%9E%D0%9D" rel="nofollow">https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%94%D0%A0%D0%90%D0%9A%D0%9E...</a>
I tried it a few years ago (DRAKON-C):<p><a href="https://github.com/dchest/drakon-tea" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/dchest/drakon-tea</a><p>It was fun, but drawing those graphs is so slower than just writing code in text... Especially, if you made a mistake somewhere and have to rearrange parts.
As a tangentaly related point...<p>Has any visual programming language ever been successful?<p>The guys at Epic are really pushing their blueprint system, and a lot of people like it... but its inherantly tied to the engine.
I've used DRAKON for generating Javascript - <a href="https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2013/04/use-drakon-to-generate-code-from-flowcharts/" rel="nofollow">https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2013/04/use-drakon-to-generate-code...</a><p>It's really quite efficient to draw out an algorithm and let the computer turn it into code. Doesn't work for every problem - but it is <i>very</i> good at what it does.
The editor:<p><a href="http://drakon-editor.sourceforge.net/" rel="nofollow">http://drakon-editor.sourceforge.net/</a><p>(it is at the bottom of Wiki page but added it here for quicker access).<p>Also Stepan Mitkin gave an Erlang Factory talk this year about the Erlang backend for DRAKON:<p><a href="http://www.erlang-factory.com/euc2015/stepan-mitkin" rel="nofollow">http://www.erlang-factory.com/euc2015/stepan-mitkin</a>
Interesting how this could tie into the diagrams coming out of the dataflow paradigm (flumejava, flink, millwheel, naiad, and Frank McSherry's rust timely-dataflow). All of which can be succinctly diagrammed out, but I like the rigor of this. People in this thread have mentioned Max/MSP (it's precursor puredata/pd) are really interesting visually, but they often feel write only. Some of the rules of drakon could be attempted in a max patch, but the shortest path nature and lack of jump labels could foil the idea.<p>At any rate, some food for thought when it comes to trying to ideate programs away from a computer or at least away from a repl or IDE.
Using SQLite for persistence is quite interesting!<p><a href="http://drakon-editor.sourceforge.net/instant_save.html" rel="nofollow">http://drakon-editor.sourceforge.net/instant_save.html</a>
Can't we make text-based programming visual with some IDE/plugins?<p>It would be interesting to drag functions around (and so forth) in blocks.