It seems like about every five years or so, some higher-up in my organization pushes down some "enterprise" graphical logic builder program that's supposed to simplify the creation of "complex business rules" so that even non-programmers can maintain them. Inevitably they end up being some variation of a drag-and-drop logic builder where something that resembles a flowchart is created by dragging if statements and loop constructs out of a tool palette onto a blank canvas. Of course, this is presented as "revolutionary" every time (even though I've seen the same thing at least five times already), costs a fortune, and turns out to be worse than useless - what the "non-programmers" are able to produce using this thing is limited to what can fit on a single screen (the thing slows down so much that it's unusable if you go bigger than a screen), and impossible to debug in any way. Yet in spite of failure after failure, I have every confidence that I'll end up dealing with more than one other graphical "business logic" tool in my career.
> some higher-up in my organization pushes down some "enterprise" graphical logic builder program... where something that resembles a flowchart is created
It should be said that the people who want to put this tool in place are the least likely to use any sort of flow chart when putting out requirements. In fact I would say that the people who are most likely to buy this are also the most likely to use pantomime and postit notes to convey requirements.
As someone considering building a graphical builder of a kind you described - "dragging if statements and loop constructs out of a tool palette onto a blank canvas" - would you have any advice/suggestions on how to make it actually useful?
It's so true what you say about how this category of applications are often presented as revolutionary and prove to be limited, bloated, difficult to debug.. I'm thinking web page builders especially, but also various attempts at graphical programming. At the same time, there are in history some (more or less) successful examples, like HyperCard.
