Towards a visual programming environment for software development

Visual programming concerns the use of graphical tools and visual metaphors for software. While various visual programming tools have been proposed, their success is largely limited to specialised programming domains. There has been less success in more general programming applications. In this paper we review a subset of the family of visual programming environments and then argue that the potential of visual programming may be better realised within the functional style of programming. Functional programming paradigms offer a range of interesting advantages when extended into graphical/visual environments. The much simpler syntactical rules reduce the range of visual metaphors required to define and facilitate a general programming language and thus may provide some help towards the provision of more robust programming environments.