I agree wholeheartedly with your comment -- no-one is actually saying that programming is fundamentally easy. I'd go even further and say that textual vs visual

I agree wholeheartedly with your comment -- no-one is actually saying that programming is fundamentally easy. I'd go even further and say that textual vs visual is a bit of a false dichotomy. Text is a form of visual notation. We format our source code carefully to achieve specific visual effects. The same AST can be rendered in many different ways of various visual richness. Formatted text is just one point in a continuum of possible visualisations of the same AST.