[drothlis]

    In the big picture, visual programming is very natural. It is, in fact,
    so natural that we often make flowcharts of how systems work. It would
    be better if these flowcharts would actually be the system, rather than
    an incomplete, possibly outdated description.

    In the details, visual programming is just an inconvenient gimmick.
    IMHO. It may change one day.

Not exactly the same, but it reminds me of Smalltalk environments, which give you a "browser" to view classes, inheritance relationships, etc etc. while giving you a code editor for the actual method implementations (example: https://vimeo.com/27850933 ).

    We use two types of files to program Glow. The detail files, which can
    contain anything, and the overview files, which may only contain
    constants and how components are connected to each other. An overview
    file may not use macros.
    
    Both are editable with any text editor, but the overview file can also
    be edited visually as a vectorized flowchart (vectorized to zoom in on
    details)

"Both are editable with any text editor" sounds much better (to me with my admittedly limited experience with Smalltalk) than Smalltalk's file-less model where everything is a change to the whole system "image".