Back in the 1980's, I heard virtually the same argument -- just replace "C++" and "visualization" with "assembly language" and "compilers". There turned out to

Back in the 1980's, I heard virtually the same argument -- just replace "C++" and "visualization" with "assembly language" and "compilers". There turned out to be lots of room for improvements at the top! We could put almost all of the old housekeeping and busywork into our tools, and use a much simpler language for describing the unique parts of our program that we actually care about. I see no evidence that our current style of object-oriented programming is going to turn out to be the pinnacle of computing abstraction. The median language is (slowly but steadily) climbing the abstraction ladder, and each step brings it closer to an abstract visualization.