Visual programming was pretty popular in the architecture industry last I remember. Mograph is also another area where I've seen people use it a lot, (its hard to hand model and animate thousands of objects), It's also great for developing shaders and textures that depend on different colors and noise values.
Programmers might dislike visual programming because you give up a lot of control, but artists have a far easier time using them than writing "const int x = foo", etc since they have to basically learn a whole new language/subject matter.
On that note, I think anything that isn't particularly algorithm heavy and visual could enable a different class of people (like designers and artists) to access the utility of programming logic without having to learn a whole new language and paradigm of thinking. Who knows, maybe in the future, front-end ui work might be done by designers using a "photoshop-for-interfaces" software rather than programmers writing react components.
It’s what got me working on Retool (https://tryretool.com). The idea is that visual programming has a bad rap, primarily because it’s being used in the wrong places. Most people try to apply visual programming to end-user software (Twitter, Airbnb, etc.). But because visual programming is really good for getting to an 80% solution in 20% of the time, and because 80% of Twitter really isn’t good enough (imagine Twitter with no autocomplete for tagging other users), building customer-facing software is precisely visual programming’s worst use case!
Retool’s focused specifically on building internal software. The idea is that, for internal software, 80% literally is 80%. And so visual programming is particularly suited for building internal stuff. Here’s a 4 minute demo video: https://vimeo.com/303811211. (People have described it as Delphi or Visual Basic in the cloud. In this case, the cloud is actually helpful, since it lets you distribute the created apps easily with authentication, authorization, and audit logs.)
If anybody has any feedback, or otherwise wants to hypothesize on why we’re still programming in text editors, please let me know! I’m david@.