> But people discounting coding GUIs left and right, just because they haven't seen a good example of it yet
It's not just because I haven't seen a good example, it's because we have 50 years of bad examples. When something has been tried and failed by so many people for such a length of time you have to at least consider the possibility that the idea is just a fundamentally bad one.
I think I'm more likely to see flying cars in my life time then a decent GUI for general purpose programming. The problem with both is that they are fundamentally flawed.
Arguably, modern IDEs are decent GUIs for general purpose programming. Comparted to programming by editing files in a bash shell, they provide lots of visual tools (autocomplete, debugging) to track the dependencies between objects in the code, which is what a graphical interface provides over independent files.
It's not just because I haven't seen a good example, it's because we have 50 years of bad examples. When something has been tried and failed by so many people for such a length of time you have to at least consider the possibility that the idea is just a fundamentally bad one.
I think I'm more likely to see flying cars in my life time then a decent GUI for general purpose programming. The problem with both is that they are fundamentally flawed.