After all, we use lots of comments to give some structure to text-based coding.
There was a post about https://github.com/samuelmtimbo/unit recently, which at least uses some kind of hinted auto-layout (besides the more propriety fancy)
I really want to see more graphical coding for years, but node/graph-based and blockly seem to be the only approaches that got sone traction so far. So I like this thread and it seems at the right place.
I'd wish to see more use of 2D and now 3D space for structuring, annotation and overall overview and navigation. Text plus a directory tree view can't be everything, especially since we have so many structural views for coding, runtime, versioning that basically are connected in our mind, but also could be in a space with more dimensions. Not sure if we could find/agree on a common denominator, though. Text is one because it's basically the bottom of common ground. Not sure if that's not just the trivial solution (ok, I am).
I love visual tools and I think they are underutilized today. I cut my teeth in ~2005 with Houdini[0] and Fusion[1] which are both heavily graph / node based (and procedural).
Most recently I have been rekindling my love for visual programming and flow based programming and plan to spend some time in January and February doing more research around flow based programming for infrastructure management.
I plan to get this sort of info published on my website which I have neglected for half a decade or more but if you are interested in visual programming you might enjoy checking these out:
Unit from Samuel Timbó:
https://github.com/samuelmtimbo/unit
A video of me exploring what I figured out about it (while also learning to stream) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vwknTfGVDq8
Behave-Graph from Ben Houston:
https://github.com/bhouston/behave-graph
And the products I learned so long ago
[0] Houdini https://www.sidefx.com/products/houdini/
- A code drawn in unit is simply a Directed Graph.
- Programming can be partially performed by Gesture and by Voice.