Programs are meant to be read by humans and only incidentally for computers to execute

Maybe I’m an old fogey, but I usually hear more pushback against visual languages as being too finicky to actually create anything with and I usually advocate for a blending of them, like working in Godot and having nodes to organize behaviour but written scripts to implement it.

I really appreciate the talks from Bret Victor, like Inventing on Principle (https://youtu.be/PUv66718DII), where he makes some great points about what sorts of things our tooling, in addition to the language, could do to offload some of the cognitive load while coding. I think it’s a great direction to be thinking, where it’s feasible anyways.

Also, one reason folks new to programming at least struggle with text code is that they don’t have the patterns built up. When you’re experienced and look at a block of code, you usually don’t see each keyword, you see the concept. You see a list comprehension in Python and instantly go “Oh it’s a filter”, or you see a nested loop and go “Oh it’s doing a row/column traversal of a 2d matrix”. A newbie just sees symbols and keywords and pieces each one together individually.

…there are languages that aren’t written in plaintext???