Unless you need the screenshots to put into a powerpoint for your boss, I imagine most of us would strongly prefer tossing together a map calculator expression rather than wire together four or five different “add”, “subtract”, etc boxes.

Time will tell, but I suspect that textual scripts and command lines will be back in vogue in the GIS community. They are already experiencing a renaissance of sorts in general computing: What is google if not a command line for the internet? I know I’m not the only one who doesn’t use bookmarks much anymore. And look at Quicksilver on the Mac, or Enso Launcher for PCs…

Speaking of DOS – I used to get a lot of mileage out of personal geodatabases, ArcReader, batch files, and scheduled tasks. Think about that formula for a minute.

I agree that it’s a dying art though. I feel sorry for those that never give the computer the commands, because otherwise the computer gives the user commands, and that’s never fun for long.

I’d rather call them “graphical script editors” or “graphical workflow editors”.

Diagramming sounds like visio ..

Besides that, I think you are right, and those “arrows” are more reliable than writing variable names in notepad, where you can scramble the variable names easily and do not see what is going wrong.

Often, the best thing is a combination of command-line and graphical editing.

Set up your translation in your graphical environment (modelbuilder or workbench) and then use a command-line script (yeah, good old dos .bat -files) to batch the translation and apply it to all the files in a folder …

like

for %%f in (*.shp) do (
fme.exe myShape2TabConversion.fmw ^
–inputFile %%f ^
–outputFile %%~nf.tab ^
LOGFILE_NAME %%~nf.log
)

In Geoprocessing, I would go for a Python script like

import arcgisscripting

gp = arcgisscripting.create()

gp.workspace = something
gp.addtoolbox(yourtoolbox)

fcs = gp.listfeatureclasses(“*”,”ALL)

fc = fcs.Next()

while fc:
gp.callyourmodelhere(fc)
fc = fcs.Next()