Author here. Thanks for the discussion.
UML didn't pick up for whatever reason and visual programming fell into the valley of deception. I expect that with more UI/UX research we can get to the plateau of productivity in the next decade.
Btw, there is a variant of UML that is executable. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executable_UML
Wrong. Here is a thing, soviet spaceship Buran, which was performing fully automated landing in 1991, was programmed with this stuff - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DRAKON. Teams of software engineers created this language so rocker scientists would be able to programm spaceship without software developers.
> there is a variant of UML that is executable.
If you believe it's a good way, you should certainly go that way. Please write about your experiences afterwards.
Rose 2.0, I've mentioned and quoted explicitly, produced the code from the diagrams (that's the "code generation" from the quote). And it was tragedy. Maybe you find somebody's experiences on the web.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rational_Software
"The development of Rose 2.0 combined a Windows-based Booch notation editor called Object System Designer (acquired from Wisconsin-based Palladio) with a new intermediate representation, and with new semantic analysis, code generation, and reverse engineering capabilities. The latter, which allowed prospective customers to analyze existing C++ code to produce "as-built" navigable class diagrams, helped overcome Rational's late re-entry into the market for object-oriented modeling tools. Rose 2.0 ran on Windows PCs and on several Unix-based workstations."
It wasn't usable, except to be used in the projects doomed to fail. Or spend a lot of money. Which is something a goal of the managers. But it still can't be named a success.