Writing code can't be done with a visual shader editor, thats why I prefer the A7 method.
It is still the same process of shader editing:
You have a lot of processes (basic, mathematical, complex and interpolant). And you connect these pre-defined processes in a similar way as you would program it in your code. It is just another kind of programming, a graphical approach just like Kismet is for Unreal or the graphical scripting approach in C4 (similar to the shader editor).
But the big difference is that it works on more than one platform. It does not matter what is behind these processes (CG, ASM or HLSL). Actually in C4 it is even more low-level than CG.
