From Ted Leung
Nicely executed? Yes.
Useful? Yes.
Overhyped after one day? Yes.
obligatory self-history reference: When I was co-op’ing at GTE Government Systems from 1991-1995 while going to NC State. I, like 50 thousand people before me I’m sure, wrote a hardware and software asset inventory application. First in excel macros, then in HyperCard, and then I tried to write it in File Maker Pro when hypercard became irritatingly slow as more data was added. But FMPro didn’t have the visual constructs that HyperCard had. So I went looking for Graphical-oriented programming tools. When I first saw ProGraph, I thought it was going to be the greatest thing ever, and that all programming was going to evolve to using Visual Programming Languages. I think I even tried convincing my boss to buy it.
Then I tried it and realized that the Visual Programming Language revolution was never going to happen.
However, it still shows up in kid’s programming StarLogo — and I think that one of the Lego Mindstorms software tools is based on LabView. So maybe the VPL’s will one day rule (Heck, I keep wanting to do something cool in Quartz Composer)