Interestingly, visual programming and tree-editing has actually gained a lot of traction with non-programmers. Tons of the big video and audio production suites

Interestingly, visual programming and tree-editing has actually gained a lot of traction with non-programmers. Tons of the big video and audio production suites (off the top of my head: Houdini, Max MSP, Grasshopper, Nuke, Blender's node editor) are DAG-based authoring tools, and are a joy to use. As a person interested in programming language design, that makes me wonder if visual programming might be the sort of thing that we as programmers don't use because it is, in some sense, "beneath us". You can argue that the complexity of a standard Max patch is much lower than your production system, but many production systems are "render database to JSON", which seems far less complex than, say, a feature film, many of which are made almost entirely in Houdini.