In game visual programming language ?

[JustGoFly]

I have 8K+ Hours in game, write mods, and love this game. I see all the smarts you continue to add to the game and controls to enable the game to be more fun. But after playing Desynced, and writing code to control their bots, but not loving the game play, I was wondering if Wube would ever consider starting a scripting language in game to enable players to control something. Ideally a visual scripting language would enable non-programmers to do same. Given the latest FFF on Spidertrons, that would be a perfect place to start. It's not a smart "tron" - perfect to use for a scripting language. We could code up and share various types of bots:

Patrol Spidertron, Attack tron, PvP tron, Guard tron, or even build or supply tron.

This would get people rushing to get to spiders. Not auto fire, you detect something - decide what that something is, and place a bomb in a tile based on calculations of speed and direction of two measurements of that object.

This is a direction I would love to see Factorio take - and if not, make hooks to enable modders to develop scriptable bots, controlling movement and actions. I read the improvements on bots and thought "Why would they take away the fun of us making our own smart bots".

[Qon]

We already have a visual programming language, what we need is a textual one. Not more visual languages. Visual programming languages are ok for learning some basic logic concepts for a few minutes, but after that it just holds you back. Small kids can enjoy visual programming languages slightly longer, sure, but that isn't the Factorio audience.

If they make a new visual programming language then we are forced to make a decent textual language that compiles to the visual language just to get some benefit from it. Visual languages are basically read only and uneditable in comparison to textual languages. You lose everything that a text editor gives you and gain nothing in return worthwhile. No copy-paste, no line insertions, no search, no search and replace all, no regex, no goto definition, no version control, no sharing of code (no copy paste), no collaboration, exceptionally space inefficient so no overview, you run out of space so you can't write any more, no abstractions (so you have to copy paste, which you can't either), clunky editing in all aspects, slow and frustrating experience using it in every conceivable way.

No one uses visual programming languages for anything serious and I just mentioned a small part of the even longer list of why.

[Illiander42]

I'm pretty sure there are visual editors for Lua.

And what are Factorio combinators if not a visual programming language?

> make hooks to enable modders to develop scriptable bots

AAI Automation already exists.