[jerf]

I've come to think that one of the other problems non-textual approaches need to solve to win at scale is that they need to somehow get rid of their coordinates. Right now, most of the non-text oriented approaches I see mean that I have to not only understand the same thing I'd have to understand in a textual representation, but I also have the additional complexity of all of my code having coordinates in a 2D space, and then if you start drawing lines on the screen for relationships, additional accidental complexity in the state of the lines too.

The more I think about it, the more I think the people who tend to make criticisms about textual representations and then argue in favor of visual representations are not just wrong, but usually have things actively backwards; almost every criticism they make about text is actually a positive aspect of it. Not having a literal line appear from a call site to what it is calling, for instance, is a net positive, not a problem. I think this is why visual stuff has been bubbling slowly for decades and just never seems to get anywhere the way its advocates hope.