"Visual programming" means "crippled tools" because tooling is at least an order of magnitude harder with a visual language than with text. As a small example,

"Visual programming" means "crippled tools" because tooling is at least an order of magnitude harder with a visual language than with text. As a small example, let's talk about ignoring cosmetic details in a program. How do you do that with text? You strip whitespace, comments perhaps, and you have a pretty good approximation short of building a syntax graph. How do you do that with flow charts? How do you "strip" purple diamonds versus green boxes? Is the shape cosmetic? The length of line? What about dashed lines, are those semantically meaningful? What about the layout? Do leftmost lines take precedence or can you rearrange the order of edges? Or are the edges labelled somehow to specify precedence? What does this all mean? Well, it's possible to come up with really compelling demoware. So it's easy to write an article or pitch a concept. But writing a commonly understood visual programming language is hard because we don't really have visual languages, full stop. The closest thing we have are mostly-universal signage, but that's just about tagging matter and locations, not about communicating complex thoughts about procedures.