> Once you have a good mapping from thoughts to code, the visual part doesn't add much. Having the visual representation readily available is indeed "great for

> Once you have a good mapping from thoughts to code, the visual part doesn't add much. Having the visual representation readily available is indeed "great for reading the code and sanity checking". Writing code (here meaning text or visual) involves reading code, both the code you're currently writing and anything that is connected to it. Thus the visual representation is also good for writing code. I'm not advocating a low bandwidth interaction model. I can certainly see why some people might quickly grow tired of Scratch, but I'd argue that's a problem with the specific language/editor, not something that is universally applicable to anything that tries to go beyond "text". Structured editors can beat text editors in interaction speed.