The idea of visual programming is that we'll make the syntax easier for people by using colors and shapes and connecting things together in 2D. To me that seem

The idea of visual programming is that we'll make the syntax easier for people by using colors and shapes and connecting things together in 2D. To me that seems misguided. When it comes to parsing a stream of text into concepts, humans have hardware acceleration. You're doing it right now, effortlessly. Visual formatting cues can help, but only at a pretty crude level, compared to our sophisticated understanding of language and grammar. Furthermore programming requires that you extend the notation every time you use it. This implies that programming can only be represented well with combinations of symbols, of which the example par excellence is text.