Products · Broad category
Visual programming
Raised as a usability problem by 28 people on Hacker News over 15 years (2012–2026), in 18 threads.
This is a broad category rather than one product, so its issues aren't ranked on the home page.
No issue was raised by at least 3 people in 3 threads this year.
No issue was raised by at least 3 people in 3 threads in the last 5 years.
Every issue, all time, most people first
Hard to find graph start and end; mouse-driven editing is slowUnreviewed
20122026- Moving or changing many visual nodes is almost impossible; simple edits take many clicks2019-01-29
- Hard to find start and end of a graph; mouse-driven graph editing is slow2017-06-04
- Drag and drop is a bad UI for editing graph-based programs2016-07-16
Flowchart logic becomes unworkably clunky as complexity growsUnreviewed
20122026- Describing processes as flowcharts becomes painful and slow very quickly2021-02-15
- Becomes unworkably clunky to manipulate flowchart logic as complexity grows2020-05-21
- Laying out flow graphs and naming icons for functions gets cluttered and hard to manage2017-06-05
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 29 complaints
- Visual code systems become hard to use for real work compared with text2026-06-25
- Freely positioned elements create noisy diffs, resist formatting, and become spaghetti2024-07-27
- Visual programs lack powerful search, so finding things is hard compared to grep2024-07-15
- After every small edit, layout must be manually fixed, taking ten minutes2024-07-15
- Visual code representations are hard to communicate about and don't match how developers read code2024-07-08
- Comments and labels don't survive conversion between visual graph and text representations2024-07-08
- Large diagrams become a tangled web of connections that people can't comprehend2024-07-08
- Visual programming adds extra UI to manage and visual discrimination tasks on top of programming2022-03-14
- Too many options to manage via menus; constant switching between keyboard and mouse slows work2021-07-02
- Describing processes as flowcharts becomes painful and slow very quickly2021-02-15
- Becomes unworkably clunky to manipulate flowchart logic as complexity grows2020-05-21
- A commenter says the phrasing is so unclear they cannot understand the claim being made2020-04-26
- Block-based programming tools are hard to use; copying, refactoring and composing are slow with the mouse2019-07-19
- Visual programming forces slow clicking, dragging and positioning instead of fast keyboard input2019-01-29
- Moving or changing many visual nodes is almost impossible; simple edits take many clicks2019-01-29
- Visual programs need separate copies or hidden variables to handle many room configurations2019-01-29
- Doing anything outside the norm requires hunting through menus for the right setting2019-01-29
- Visual tools are too rigid and slow for advanced users2018-11-20
- Selecting rows or data in visual programming is very tedious compared to a normal GUI2017-10-11
- Large data structures are hard to hold in memory, forcing constant returns to definitions2017-06-05
- Laying out flow graphs and naming icons for functions gets cluttered and hard to manage2017-06-05
- Input stays slower than typing once users know the tool well2017-06-05
- Once programs grow complex, the visual layout becomes tangled and hard to follow2017-06-04
- Visual programs become hairy and unmanageable as complexity grows beyond simple examples2017-06-04
- Hard to find start and end of a graph; mouse-driven graph editing is slow2017-06-04
- Drag and drop is a bad UI for editing graph-based programs2016-07-16
- Everything crammed into one huge flat canvas, hard to manage2015-02-03
- Spends ages hunting for the right icon instead of typing code2013-06-13
- Visual tools become difficult to use for complex logic and configuration2012-08-29