Today’s big news is that Microsoft made a $44.6bn takeover bid for Yahoo! And I thought Yahoo! was so 90’s.

If the deal goes ahead, will it have implications related the visual programming? We all know that NI is the leading developer of visual programming languages with its LabVIEW integrated programming language and development environment. However neither Microsoft nor Yahoo! have been completely quiet in this scene. Yahoo! has developed a domain specific visual programming environment Yahoo! Pipes for aggregating web feeds and other online information resources. Microsoft has developed a little similar tool, Mashup Creator, for their Popfly online web development environment. In addition Microsoft has a product called Microsoft Robotics Studio for robotics application development.

Even though the products of both Microsoft and Yahoo! are rather simple and restricted, they indicate that visual programming is slowly coming of age. However consolidation of services from the two companies doesn’t necessarily mean anything good for a minor field like visual programming. It’s very plausible that projects like Popfly and Pipes end up dead when giants like Microsoft and Yahoo integrate their organizations.

What do you think? Will Microsoft’s possible deal with Yahoo! have implications in the field of visual programming?

Visual programming is gaining more and more visibility outside the the LabVIEW community. In ITWritings blog Tim Anderson draw attention to the fact that multiple visual programming languages have gained public attention lately. These include a visual programming environment Scratch for kids by MIT, Yahoo pipes RSS feed syndication language and Microsoft PopFly online visual programming language for Silverlight.

It seems that visual programming languages are gaining attention in the field of domain specific languages. This is definitely the right route to go as the main stream general purpose programming languages are hard to replace. In addition domain specific languages allow gathering experience on visual programming in general that can later be leveraged on more general purpose language domains.

National Instruments (NI) has been very protective in the field of visual programming. NI owns multiple visual programming related patents and has used this patent portfolio to keep other companies out of the field of visual programming. It’s interesting to see if NI will continue it’s protective policy and sue MIT, Yahoo and Microsoft for patent infringements.