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Visual programming is stuck on the form
Underlying great creations that you love—be it music, art, or technology—its form (what it looks like) is driven by an underpinning internal logic (how it works). I noticed this pattern while watching a talk on cellular automaton and realized it's "form follows function" paraphrased from a slightly different
Visual programming has long been trapped in the node-and-wires paradigm because its designers are overly fixated on form, neglecting the underlying function that should drive it. What I mean by "underlying nature" isn't that it exists independently of human creation; rather, every design is embedded in an environment that shapes its intrinsic properties. Too many back-end engineers misinterpret 'form follows function' as a license to design arbitrary database tables and APIs, assuming that the front end will compensate.
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