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