How is the jury still out given that nobody uses anything like this for anything real beyond learning and labview dates back to 1983 and scratch to the early 2000s.

Language is the means by which human beings describe abstract data in a dense concise easy to encode and decode fashion. This is true whether its spoken or written. That it is the means we express code is unsurprising.

Lets put it another way. I'm typing this response to you on a keyboard. Can you imagine a way via drawing a picture that I could have in moments conveyed these thoughts by drawing you a picture?

See figure 1?

> But the jury is still out for visual programming systems

How many more decades of failure do we need before we decide the jury is in and visual programming is a dead end?

There are actually a number of highly successful visual programming tools. They are just hidden underneath the veneer of something else.

https://www.alteryx.com/products/alteryx-platform/alteryx-de...

Agreed. Basically all my programming is backend / CLI projects. I'd almost certainly have had a different result if I'd tried writing frontend (especially native) apps from an iPad