Patterns for visual programming With a focus on flow-based programming inspired systems

Software plays an increasingly important role in our daily lives. The development of this software is complex and hard to understand by non-professionals. Fundamental knowledge about programming languages and software structure is required to change it. By changing the logical complexity represented in software code in something more intuitively understandable, like graphical elements, even non-professionals can understand and learn to design software. Systems that are inspired by flow-based programming offer an interesting approach to this problem. This paper presents two pattern and five pattern candidates, which are a distillation from practices that are already in use. The presented pattern are Functions as building blocks and Connect building blocks. These pattern are used in established products like Node-Red[3] or n8n[2].