Software has gotten more and more complex and distributed meaning code is no longer in one place/repo. Yet we rely on code editing capabilities that have not changed much over the last +20yrs. I am seriously puzzled. I thought that by now, we would have progressed onto something else. Than again I find myself using VIM for almost a decade unable to think of what could be truly superior to wrangling some characters in order to produce a functioning program.
Probably because structured text is expressive, portable, and almost universally readable. And my voice isn't good enough to sing code into being without syntax errors.
How would a visual compiler even work? You can't really just skip the text layer unless you're willing to be married to one set of paradigms.<p>Plus, what makes anyone want to bring mechanics into programming?<p>Look at an internal combustion engine. That's your physical manifestation of visual programming. It's a bunch of blocks of different shapes and sizes fastened together to do a task. It is made no easier to grok without text. The people who can operate on such systems are called mechanics, and even they still need text to reference from time to time.<p>Part of programming, and arguably where the Art shines through brightest is <i>linguistic mastery</i> through which comes the ability to visualize the System Under Work.<p>I'm increasingly reluctant to try to teach coding primarily as opposed to computer science. Doing so robs the practitioner of that ability to perceive the visualization of what the code <i>is</i> rather than what the code actually reads as.<p>To lose that perspective is to be completely out of touch with a program. It's just a bunch of words and desperate flailing to line everything up until the compiler stops complaining. Fighting a merciless djinn hoping that you don't get saddled with the unintended consequences of not realizing what it actually was you were doing.