I don’t know about subtext specifically, but I’ve grown a bit more skeptical about the possibilities of visual programming languages over the years.
As a game developer, I sometimes had to find ways to give non-programmers control of a system—allowing a level designer to control where and when new enemies spawn, a game designer to design the attack patterns of a specific boss, a sound designer to make his music match in-game events, an FX artist to trigger specific FX at certain times … it’s not easy to do right. We programmers sometimes make things that seem obvious and simple with little graphs with arrows and dependencies, but it turns out to be a headache for someone else to wrap his head around. What seems to work best is not making a fully programmable system (even if it’s nice and visual), but rather defining a narrow set of operations that make sense for the behavior needed, and give a way of simply editing those; making something like a narrow minilanguage. And for that, simple linear text-based edition can work fine, without any graphical frills.
(Working with a visual tool works fine too, but it shouldn’t become a full-blown programming language; give a level designer a powerful turing-complete node-based scripting system, and he’ll make horribly complicated undebuggable rube goldberg machines, that could have been replaced by a few lines of code if he had explained to the right person what he needed)
Anyway, if you want to get better at programming, I don’t think you should expect much from fancy new visual languages; it may be more efficient to get someone to teach you a bit.
I don’t know about subtext specifically, but I’ve grown a bit more skeptical about the possibilities of visual programming languages over the years.
As a game developer, I sometimes had to find ways to give non-programmers control of a system—allowing a level designer to control where and when new enemies spawn, a game designer to design the attack patterns of a specific boss, a sound designer to make his music match in-game events, an FX artist to trigger specific FX at certain times … it’s not easy to do right. We programmers sometimes make things that seem obvious and simple with little graphs with arrows and dependencies, but it turns out to be a headache for someone else to wrap his head around. What seems to work best is not making a fully programmable system (even if it’s nice and visual), but rather defining a narrow set of operations that make sense for the behavior needed, and give a way of simply editing those; making something like a narrow minilanguage. And for that, simple linear text-based edition can work fine, without any graphical frills.
(Working with a visual tool works fine too, but it shouldn’t become a full-blown programming language; give a level designer a powerful turing-complete node-based scripting system, and he’ll make horribly complicated undebuggable rube goldberg machines, that could have been replaced by a few lines of code if he had explained to the right person what he needed)
Anyway, if you want to get better at programming, I don’t think you should expect much from fancy new visual languages; it may be more efficient to get someone to teach you a bit.