In my opinion, the major disadvantage of visual programming environments is the inexpressibility of complex structures respectively programs. I was doing research on a VP myself and evaluated it with some users that were no programmers. They got used to the principles fast, however they got stuck pretty fast when trying to implement complex behavior. Scaling up the VP in that terms is a balancing act between complexity and simplicity (in terms of user interface design).
Yes, most complex abstractions are hard or even infeasible to represent visually. This is why VLSI hardware design actually went the other way, from visual schematics to purely textual languages as complexity and the role of abstraction increased.
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In my opinion, the major disadvantage of visual programming environments is the inexpressibility of complex structures respectively programs. I was doing research on a VP myself and evaluated it with some users that were no programmers. They got used to the principles fast, however they got stuck pretty fast when trying to implement complex behavior. Scaling up the VP in that terms is a balancing act between complexity and simplicity (in terms of user interface design).
Yes, most complex abstractions are hard or even infeasible to represent visually. This is why VLSI hardware design actually went the other way, from visual schematics to purely textual languages as complexity and the role of abstraction increased.
VP has been making mistake of using too many layers of abstraction, unnecessarily increasing complexity trying to avoid code at all cost.