It was surprising to us (here at Retool) that visual programming has never taken off, despite …

These are the original low-code tools. Easy to pick up and your average citizen developer could figure it out with some trial and error. So much lost productivity due to whatever happened in the next several decades.

In science and engineering I would say LabVIEW has taken off. I doubt there’s a university in the world that doesn’t have it running in some capacity. Without learning LV I doubt I would have learnt to code.

> visual programming has never taken off, despite countless attempts over the past few decades. It has, in some niches like Unreal Blueprints. I think one of the reasons it doesn't become more popular is because most visual programming is just a more cumbersome and slow way of programming. It's stringing the same concepts together in the same way, but slowly and tediously with a mouse. Non-tech users wouldn't know what to do with it. Power users would rather program directly.

Visual programming is useful in some niches, but for general purpose you either have to have less power than a text based programming language (and users will beg you to add that power) or it will become exactly as complicated as a text based programming language, but more cumbersome because whatever you're doing is slower than typing. I feel like the whole idea of visual programming comes from some fundamental idea that the hard part of programming is learning the syntax, which I just don't agree with at all.

I wouldn't say it didn't take off, it just has 'landed' again somewhere over the last 10-20 years. VB, Xcode Interface Builder, Hypercard, Filemaker & Lotus Notes all had pretty good runs, we just never got something similarly successful for the web & even smartphones, probably due to compatibility issues with varying screen sizes. Once the screen can be wildly resized, it just becomes too murky. Maybe have the programmer do it manually for 2-3 sizes and then let some AI model interpolate the sizes in between?

VBA, a visual language, runs the entire planet, it's just that nobody knows it or talks about it.

Besides all sibling comments, OutSystems is doing quite well for the last 20 years. Just like most low code, CDP and data analytics tooling.