awesomelybad

Implementing an atmospheric shader in three.js is a fun way get an understanding of the interaction of the different scattering components, light, and observer’s position. Plus you get a pretty cool effect to play around with after you’re done.

It feels like it's easier to understand a complete process flow like this visually; sure a developer could probably implement individual steps for a complicated workflow faster as code, but only if they already understand how the process needs to flow in the first place. The visual paradigm almost acts to shortcut the need for a developer to "get in the zone" and load up a mental model of decision tree, but at the cost of a more rigid implementation model (you have to work within the framework of the UX that you're provided, and pretty much any GUI will fail to keep up with the speed the most advanced users "could" work at). On the other hand, I can't imagine implementing something like your example graphic in code without at least whiteboarding it out ahead of time, which is effectively just an analog way of doing visual programming.