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.