I’ve had to deal with several graphical programming languages over the years.

They only work on the most basic of use cases. The moment you want to get real work done they just get in the way.

Very much disagree, and completely dependent on what you define as "real work". There are many low-cost platforms out there that allow for very rapid development of big projects.

Disclaimer: I used to work for one of them (Mendix)

Looks like a modern Visual Basic 6. Neat.

VB6 was so horrible and productive at the same time. Single person could build an app in days that a team of 10 would struggle with today.

And a group of 10 could bring said app to a stretching halt.

So many memories, good and bad.

Indeed :) I'd say the biggest problems with platforms like these are 1: meaningfully diffing (visual diffing is an unsolved problem) and 2: the enterprise pricing.

Lock in as well.

Was at a company that invented a visual programming tool and forced development to use it.

Several flat out refused. We all went on with our careers. The people that used the proprietary system still work there, not then a decade later. They hated the tool then. But they have no marketable skills set at this point.

You completely misunderstood my comment.

Edit: Stay classy HN

It puzzles me too. I think that portability and the ability to use the same text-based tools even though you use different languages are the best reasons for sticking with text.

I think is a feeling of loss of control and having no clue what you're missing. Programs stored as unstructured text make it difficult to produce good tooling. Makes programmatic code gen hard, makes diffing hard, make automatically generating commit message impossible. Refactoring is always problematic. Merging even more so.

But it seems though even mentioning that perhaps structured data is a better way to store code makes most programmers really angry. At least that's my experience.