I appreciated reading all of this; it's a topic that obviously brings lots of opinions to the table. Here are my thoughts on the matter, honed over many years of using visual programming languages and system, starting in the mid 1980s.
Consider this. The visual system in animals has been in development for hundreds of millions of years. And yet, most animals don't think at a high level, demonstrably.
The biggest jump in human cognition is tied to the invention of speech. Speech is a fairly slow mechanism, and serial. Communication could be multi-channel and use position, tone, color, odor and movement. And yet, communication through speech dwarfs all of that. It's what let us bootstrap ourselves above other hominids and other animals. While multi-channel communication holds out the promise of high bandwidth, it's also incredibly imprecise. What exactly is being communicated in non-speech channels? That's up to far more interpretation and guessing than through the apparently more limited mechanism of speech.
Then, sometime around 10,000 to 5,000 years ago, writing was invented. Writing is even more constrained - most people can speak faster than they can write, and yet the increase in pace of development of human abilities is tied to the ability to express and manipulate thoughts in writing. It's not just that writing can be one to many (far more so than speech). It's that writing is more precise, and we can build up far bigger thoughts in writing that we can comprehend. It's likely that analogies are bootstrapped through use, first in speech, and then in writing.
So, in this framework, visual programming is doomed. It's a throwback. Despite the very large number of neurons devoted to visual processing, the amount of summarization and guessing in the visual system employed to reduce the flood of data to something manageable is also part of its weakness when it comes to forming precise and complex thoughts, and to manipulating them.
We will always visualize things in order to help understand them, because we use more of our brain when we do that. But it's the very limited and narrow mechanism of speech (and writing started as "record that speech") that makes it far more powerful when it comes to complex thoughts. If you look at all the visual programming systems that have been developed, they only work in narrow and prescribed modes. They are not open-ended, and they literally fall apart at moderate levels of complexity.
Without text (speech being the system that jump-started text), we would not really be thinking animals.
Consider this. The visual system in animals has been in development for hundreds of millions of years. And yet, most animals don't think at a high level, demonstrably.
The biggest jump in human cognition is tied to the invention of speech. Speech is a fairly slow mechanism, and serial. Communication could be multi-channel and use position, tone, color, odor and movement. And yet, communication through speech dwarfs all of that. It's what let us bootstrap ourselves above other hominids and other animals. While multi-channel communication holds out the promise of high bandwidth, it's also incredibly imprecise. What exactly is being communicated in non-speech channels? That's up to far more interpretation and guessing than through the apparently more limited mechanism of speech.
Then, sometime around 10,000 to 5,000 years ago, writing was invented. Writing is even more constrained - most people can speak faster than they can write, and yet the increase in pace of development of human abilities is tied to the ability to express and manipulate thoughts in writing. It's not just that writing can be one to many (far more so than speech). It's that writing is more precise, and we can build up far bigger thoughts in writing that we can comprehend. It's likely that analogies are bootstrapped through use, first in speech, and then in writing.
So, in this framework, visual programming is doomed. It's a throwback. Despite the very large number of neurons devoted to visual processing, the amount of summarization and guessing in the visual system employed to reduce the flood of data to something manageable is also part of its weakness when it comes to forming precise and complex thoughts, and to manipulating them.
We will always visualize things in order to help understand them, because we use more of our brain when we do that. But it's the very limited and narrow mechanism of speech (and writing started as "record that speech") that makes it far more powerful when it comes to complex thoughts. If you look at all the visual programming systems that have been developed, they only work in narrow and prescribed modes. They are not open-ended, and they literally fall apart at moderate levels of complexity.
Without text (speech being the system that jump-started text), we would not really be thinking animals.