> Every couple of years, the hope surfaces that a simple graphical interface will replace teams of developers
Wait! Just because the code is graphical instead of textual, doesn't mean its "codeless" or that non-developers can use it effectively, in a way that the results are maintainable. For example, Max/MSP is used by musicians and artists, quite successfully (so.. not doomed to fail!), but much of the code they generate is a complete mess. This isn't the fault of Max/MSP the language as much as its that the users aren't programmers and therefore never learned to reason about problems in the programmer way or learn about software engineering best practices like... abstraction. Similarly bad textual code is also written by non-programmers, so this isn't just an issue with graphical tools.
You might argue that there's a difference between graphical code like in Max/MSP and purely model-based techniques that try to hide the code-ness even more, but I'm not qualified to comment on those tools because I've not used them.
> Why do people keep trying to breathe life into a solution that is so obviously doomed to fail
I've personally had great success with Max/MSP and Synthmaker and plenty of people have had success with visual shader generation tools, Unreal Engine's Blueprints, SCADE Studio and whatnot, so I don't think its "obviously" doomed at all.
Wait! Just because the code is graphical instead of textual, doesn't mean its "codeless" or that non-developers can use it effectively, in a way that the results are maintainable. For example, Max/MSP is used by musicians and artists, quite successfully (so.. not doomed to fail!), but much of the code they generate is a complete mess. This isn't the fault of Max/MSP the language as much as its that the users aren't programmers and therefore never learned to reason about problems in the programmer way or learn about software engineering best practices like... abstraction. Similarly bad textual code is also written by non-programmers, so this isn't just an issue with graphical tools.
You might argue that there's a difference between graphical code like in Max/MSP and purely model-based techniques that try to hide the code-ness even more, but I'm not qualified to comment on those tools because I've not used them.
> Why do people keep trying to breathe life into a solution that is so obviously doomed to fail
I've personally had great success with Max/MSP and Synthmaker and plenty of people have had success with visual shader generation tools, Unreal Engine's Blueprints, SCADE Studio and whatnot, so I don't think its "obviously" doomed at all.