This thread on Hacker News terrifies me

[Kagamin]

On Sunday, 2 September 2018 at 21:07:20 UTC, Nick Sabalausky 
(Abscissa) wrote:
> GUI programming has been attempted a lot. (See Scratch for one 
> of the latest, possibly most successful attempts). But there 
> are real, practical reasons it's never made significant 
> in-roads (yet).
>
> There are really two main, but largely independent, aspects to 
> what you're describing: Visual representation, and physical 
> interface:
>
> A. Visual representation:
> -------------------------
>
> By visual representation, I mean "some kind of text, or UML-ish 
> diagrams, or 3D environment, etc".
>
> What's important to keep in mind here is: The *fundamental 
> concepts* involved in programming are inherently abstract, and 
> thus equally applicable to whatever visual representation is 
> used.
>
> If you're going to make a diagram-based or VR-based programming 
> tool, it will still be using the same fundamental concepts that 
> are already established in text-based programming: Imperative 
> loops, conditionals and variables. Functional/declarative 
> immutability, purity and high-order funcs. Encapsulation. 
> Pipelines (like ranges). Etc. And indeed, all GUI based 
> programming tools have worked this way. Because how *else* are 
> they going to work?

They say the main difficulty for non-programmers is control flow, 
not type system, one system was reported usable where control 
flow was represented visually, but sequential statements were 
left as plain C. E.g. we have a system administrator here who has 
no problem with powershell, but has absolutely no idea how to 
start with C#.

> B. Physical interface:
> ----------------------
>
> By this I mean both actual input devices (keyboards, 
> controllers, pointing devices) and also the mappings from their 
> affordances (ie, what you can do with them: push button x, tilt 
> stick's axis Y, point, move, rotate...) to specific actions 
> taken on the visual representation (navigate, modify, etc.)

Hardware engineers are like the primary target audience for 
visual programming :)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labview