I think visual programming tools are great when they are aimed at a specific domain. but not when they try to do too much. While Scratch is great for teaching kids to code, trying to come up with a visual replacement for C++ is almost certainly a bad idea.
Also it is possible to blend the two approaches. For example by allowing users to script some of the boxes in a text based language. This is the approach I have taken with my own visual-based data wrangling tool. The standard transforms cover 95% of cases people need (re-order columns, pivot, filter etc) and you can script a Javascript transform for anything else.
Also it is possible to blend the two approaches. For example by allowing users to script some of the boxes in a text based language. This is the approach I have taken with my own visual-based data wrangling tool. The standard transforms cover 95% of cases people need (re-order columns, pivot, filter etc) and you can script a Javascript transform for anything else.