[DonaldFisk]

Movie scripts and novels, graphic or otherwise, contain a narrative which is inherently sequential, and the best way to capture that is in text.

Programs in general are non-sequential (MIMD). They are normally expressed sequentially because early hardware was inherently sequential.

Music notation is graphical. So are Feynman diagrams, circuit diagrams, maps, blueprints, structural formulae, etc. Not everything is best expressed as text.

Other successful visual dataflow systems include Max, Reaktor, and Flow-based programming. The field is in its infancy and we can't be sure yet what works and what doesn't.

[beagle3]

Most of computing is actually sequential, or a small set of sequential computations carried in parallel, often reactively based on an input. So you agree that in cases well described this way (e.g., a Word processor or a Web browser or an Excel spreadsheet) text is a better decription of the computation? Specifically, re:excel, I'm talking about describing Excel itself, not a specific spreadsheet (which may sometimes have a reasonable graphical representation)

Music notation is graphical, and still gets complaints for being "hard to read" by people who haven't mastered it. My intention for bringing it up was not "see, it's not working", but rather "see, it doesn't make things simpler".

Circuit diagrams are graphical only for very small and simple circuits, which illustrates my point about scaling - there is no circuit diagram for any circuit with more than a few tens of elements anymore. Take a simple processor, for example - there are textual descriptions (verilog, vhdl, ihdl, ...) which are compiled into logic gates and/or netlists (textual or binary), and the result of layout (which is graphical, but not for human consumption). There's a block diagram, yes, and a small number of those blocks can be zoomed into another block diagram or a circuit -- but by and large, with the exception of manual layout tweaking, it is textual -- and that's in an area that started with diagrams and still champions them in its courses.

I disagree that the field is in its infancy - we've had pen and paper diagrams for everything in computing since forever, none of which has scaled so far to a complete system (some are ok for toplevel, some are ok at the really bottom level, non work in the middle) , including flow charts, data flow diagrams, UML and its tens of different diagrams, etc.

I would love to be proven wrong, though, but personally I have given up on this kind of things.