[oolongtea]

ANI/Plaid reminded me of the LabVIEW visual dataflow language, which is quite widely used in the branch of physics I used to work in, for data acquisition and instrument control. While I've often longed for a text-based alternative that plays better with modern version control and my favorite text editors, I have to say that having everything laid out for you in a visual way does make it easier to reason about the execution flow. That is, after a few years of working with it --- initially, this paradigm shift was rather a painful stretch of the nerves.

If every language has its own specific dark patterns and bottlenecks, LabVIEW's is definitely the "brightly-colored spaghetti" structural breakdown of an advanced beginner's code :-)

Incidentally, why do we, as programmers, tend to focus on a language's bottlenecks so much, in such an emotionally charged way? Any psychology-of-programming people out here? You might consider LabVIEW an excellent case study in getting on people's nerves...