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Discussion on: Should programming languages be made for IDEs rather than humans?

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Zuodian Hu

This exists, in the form of LabVIEW, Simulink, and other such thing. They are even widely used in industry because they're excellent for expressing complicated mathematics.

However, as others have pointed out, they all suffer in some way or another from portability issues. Until we have an equivalent of ASCII and UNICODE standards for these model based languages, they simply aren't very likely to catch the kind of traction text-based languages have. The tooling will never get to that point without an open and popular standard.

Additionally, for that kind of programming to kick off, something must be able to take up the role that C and C++ currently fill as the backbone of close-to-hardware software. I don't think it's impossible, but I also don't think there's enough incentive to put in that effort right now. Modern tooling has made C/C++ programming highly productive, and getting a non-text language up to feature-parity and portability-parity would be unjustifiably expensive right now.