[sBqQu3U0wH]

>There's an analogy to programming: sure we have visual programming tools but who uses them?

I really don't think this is a good analogy. Clearly presenting an idea / architecture / model / workflow at a high level by creating a graphical representation is quite different than making an application does a lot of things at a low level (e.g. handling user interactions, processing data, providing GUI, communicating with other systems, handling errors).

I agree there may be some benefits to that but I guess it also depends on what kind of diagrams you are making. For example, I would never ever draw UML diagrams in markup. I want to be in control how elements look, where they are placed, where and how lines are drawn and where and how they are shown. In my experience, automatic placement even on GUI diagramming tools suck 99.9% of the time.