My problem with graphical programming systems (and here I'm thinking about a few very different entities: Prograph is the extreme case, HyperCard and Interface Builder for Apple's Yellow Box are more typical ones) is their failure to produce documentation for what's there or they hide what's going on by requiring many different windows to be open.
There's no documentation feature which allows someone to tell the application or its UI (whatever you're working on) to document itself -- so you end up hopping
from place to place, reference to reference, striving to maintain context. I
HATE this. With a passion. Even Smalltalk can be a pain with three or four browsers open at a time while I try to figure out just WHAT object is going to respond to a message that has been sent. I must be too old or something.
One of the things that I liked best about the GUI Builder in SmalltalkAgents was that when it built a window it wrote the code for that window which I could then see and, if needed, edit.
In InterfaceBuilder (in Apple's Yellow Box) you build an interface and hook up the feature -- but then result is all concealed in a NIB file which is a black box -- there's no way to tell IB to write out in human-readable form what the contents of that NIB file are.
This inability to concisely document is, to me, the greatest weakness of graphical tools.
Thanks for listening -- pant pant pant....
Adam Bridge
squeak-dev@lists.squeakfoundation.org