My horse carriage is very useful. The horse just feeds itself, if you leave him in a grass field. It rarely gets sick and last many years. The wheels are easily replaced from the store.
The other day I saw a crazy guy with a mechanical contraption that, according to the guy, moved by burning wood! The guy was demoing it at the town. He filled it with wood, and then had to start the fire. The crazy machine got so hot that nobody could get near it. The thing barely moved a few meters and then Kabooooom!! it exploded in a black cloud. What sane person may ever believe that one of these contraptions could be useful?
Am I right? Are you right? we don't know. Research is the only way to know.
The first visual programming language I can find is from 1966. They have always been tiny, niche things over a period where we've had waves of text-based languages rise and fall.
One of the striking things for me when I talk with visual programming enthusiasts is that they very rarely have looked at the decades of research. And if you try to talk with them about the history, they seem actively averse.
There's a joke that some people have ten years of experience, and some people just have one year of experience ten times over. My experience has been that visual programming is more like the latter, but for 50 years.
There are decades of research. It's not unreasonable to adjust expectations based on that.
Honestly, I feel part of the problem is that this seems to attract people who think that text is bad and more visual = better, while the truth probably is that you need to be really, really careful to arrive at something that doesn't explode in complexity when confronted with all the little details of ordinary programs.
The other day I saw a crazy guy with a mechanical contraption that, according to the guy, moved by burning wood! The guy was demoing it at the town. He filled it with wood, and then had to start the fire. The crazy machine got so hot that nobody could get near it. The thing barely moved a few meters and then Kabooooom!! it exploded in a black cloud. What sane person may ever believe that one of these contraptions could be useful?
Am I right? Are you right? we don't know. Research is the only way to know.