Products · Broad category
Visual programming languages
Raised as a usability problem by 19 people on Hacker News over 13 years (2011–2023), in 15 threads.
This is a broad category rather than one product, so its issues aren't ranked on the home page.
People raised many different problems with Visual programming languages, but no single problem has yet been raised by 3 people in 3 different months and threads.
Unreviewed issues were grouped by machine: Claude Haiku labelled each comment as a usability complaint, named what it's about and summed up the problem in a line, and a small model grouped similar problems. Nobody has checked them by hand. Expect mistakes.
The newest 19 complaints
- Editing expressions in the visual blocks gets cumbersome for users2023-11-21
- Deleting code blocks is clunky and hard to do2023-11-21
- Command names like forward and left mislead about what they do2023-11-21
- Editing visual graphs is awkward and slow compared to text, and graphs become a messy tangle as they grow2022-11-16
- ASCII-art visual layouts are very hard to edit in a plain text editor2022-07-13
- Couldn't figure out how to make GUI apps in Visual Studio2022-02-26
- Visual tool's error messages are so poor the commenter bypassed the UI to debug HTTP calls2022-01-29
- Large visual node graphs are verbose, cumbersome and hard to navigate2020-06-30
- Visual programs become spaghetti; making and breaking links and navigating large systems is painful2020-05-21
- Composing with a mouse needs more precise, attention-heavy aiming, clicking and dragging than typing2020-05-21
- Finding, dragging and dropping blocks is slower and more error-prone than typing2020-05-21
- Visual projects cram too much onto one screen, forcing constant panning and zooming2019-12-05
- Must spend lots of time arranging boxes; wires cross, misleading2018-12-11
- Editors fight typing habits, so users feel they are fighting the editor2017-06-05
- Complex visual scripts become hard to debug, with spaghetti logic and subtle bugs2015-12-18
- Describing even simple device behavior with visual or English interfaces yields a tangled mess2015-10-24
- Hard to navigate and lay out many disconnected little editors2014-02-21
- Tracing wires between nodes is hard; little information fits on screen2013-11-15
- Too many options to pick from makes entering code slower than typing text2011-04-11