I see what you mean, but I think that we are both correct - I agree entirely that stories in pictures can give both a deeper or quicker understanding of most to

I see what you mean, but I think that we are both correct - I agree entirely that stories in pictures can give both a deeper or quicker understanding of most topics - the issue is that they cannot clarify or directly state something. The best works of art are open to many interpretations - or we would never re-read imaginative literature, re-visit galleries we had been to previously, and so on. On the other hand, for an instruction manual, there is little room for interpretation as the words only have so many definitions (though read "Authority and American Usage" by DFW to really open a can of worms), so we do not often re-read a manual for a process we know (though it could be argued we ought to). I also concede that for simple tasks entirely visual instruction manuals suffice, and to that end I will say that I've enjoyed writing simple things with Scratch (for example), but I would hesitate to write a program that needed to be maintained with a visual language. To put a more fine point on it: For the top 1% of programmers it may be the case that they would work best in a visual language, but the maintenance and support of those applications by the bottom 99% would erase many of the gains (I am here assuming programming as a professional activity in support of an organization's goals, not, as it were, a strictly artistic personal activity). In a professional context - I am unfeeling about what my predecessors felt about any part of the code, I only need to know what their intentions were, and I need them to tell me so, as explicitly as possible. *Edit: I think that there may be use in clarifying whether we are discussing professional programming or programming as a hobby - because I enjoy both, and while I enjoy learning and using some languages (cough Haskell, Lisp) for myself, I would be very hesitant to use them professionally due to the difficulty others have in maintaining/understanding them. (Food for thought: why do Java, Javascript, and Python absolutely dominate our field despite having "better" alternatives?)