Visual languages are not good for representing complex state, but they're great for representing complex data transformations - often much better than textual l

Visual languages are not good for representing complex state, but they're great for representing complex data transformations - often much better than textual languages. If you want to transform the structure of an input file (or any stream) with a hierarchical structure to an exit file with a different structure, in a text language you need to build a parser following the data's grammar, and create a state machine that represents the required transformations, which is not an easy task. With a flow language, you just draw an input component for each level of the hierarchy and list the data fields supported by that component; and then do the same for the output structure. The task is typically much simpler, as long as the task is pure data transformation and you don't need any side-effects during its execution.