Scratch and similar block-based environments could be "the real deal". If you ignore the pretty blocks, you can see that scratch is nearly a normal language. T

Scratch and similar block-based environments could be "the real deal". If you ignore the pretty blocks, you can see that scratch is nearly a normal language. There is no reason we can't have a language with both representations, plain text and pretty blocks. You could even have a hotkey to switch the pretty colors on and off. I strongly suspect that most modern programming languages would almost work with a block-based editor. You might need to leave out a few things, but not much. Consider C. You can't tolerate a macro that expands to an opening curly brace, but you can tolerate both function-like and const-like macros. You could load many normal *.c files, and you could save them, and the only thing lost would be some whitespace.