Visual editors seem to be popping up everywhere. My first experience with a visual editor was one designed to teach children how to program called Scratch. This thing is pretty cool. I liked that everything in an OOP language was mapped to something all children can relate to, puzzle pieces. The IDE itself is really easy to get started w/ and has built in support for I/O such as the webcam and microphone. Great for kids to dive into with-out much learning curve.
However, now visual editors are popping up that promote the ability to create ‘big boy’ applications like in Android or Javascript. Now, I have mixed emotions. Is it a bad thing when people learn this way? Probably not. Would it be bad if people always programmed this way? Maybe. At its core it’s not ‘generated’ code, but it’s close. You could argue that using a puzzle IDE would eliminate sytax inconsistances but at what cost? Speed? Space? I can’t imagine a looking over someones puzzle code for an enterprise application…but maybe I’m just being closed-minded.
Overall, I think it’s an interesting avenue that no doubt will be explored in the coming years. But what’s so tough about function() { echo ‘hello world’; } ?