Do you think they can be powerful enough to build production-grade applications some day or are they going to stay as educational tools or build into specific applications forever?
LabVIEW is largely visual and used to build production grade applications in engineering.
By visual, you mean node-based?
There are other ways to structure and edit programs than just a bunch of source files that we manually edit through a text editor. For instance image files as in Smalltalk. I don’t see any reason why a visual representation couldn’t succeed in this regard. The issue, imo, is that text is really nice to work with, and it would require a very nice visual editing experience to beat the text based tools we have today.
I loved teaching Scratch. And I’ve written about DRAKON - https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2023/04/why-arent-there-more-visual-programming-languages-an-ode-to-drakon/
I think they’re useful for building algorithms. But the tools themselves aren’t powerful enough for anything too complicated. I hope that changes though!
