How Useful are Visual Languages?
These are not the only two tools that let you write programs visually. Novell’s Visual AppBuilder provides components for transparently running a server application locally or across a network. Prograph, from Prograph International(Halifax, Nova Scotia), was among the first visual programming languages and is useful for database access. The question remains as to whether use of visual languages can progress beyond simple demonstration applications to large-scale software-development efforts. The snappy demonstrations that come with the software may not be readily scalable to more complicated tasks. One developer told me that the tool he was using “fell apart” with applications using more than 300 objects. Tools that interact with existing technologies may turn out to be the most useful. For example, PARTS lets you encapsulate existing traditional C or Cobol code as a PARTS object, allowing you to abstract an existing engine and visually extend it to include a GUI and other functions. N
