There is general agreement that most people should have some programming ability, whether
to investigate the vast amount of data around them or for professional purposes. Visual
Programming Languages comprise two broad categories: Flow-based, functional programming
or Block-based, imperative programming. However, there has been a lack of empirical studies
in the visual programming domain to evaluate the relative benefits of the two categories. This
research provides an empirical study to analyze the effects of the comparison between Flowbased
and Block-based paradigm, to determine which of the two representations is easier for
non-programmers or novice programmers. Each user is given a random, simple problem to
program in a random environment. Both of the environments, Flow-based and Block-based
are designed to be as similar as possible to make the comparison useful. The results indicate
that Flow and Block are equivalent environments for non-programmers or novice programmers
in terms of usability and effectiveness.
Comparison of flow-based versus block-based programming for naive programmers
