I think the lack of auto layout is actually a pretty significant part of the problem. It is an unsolved problem in data viz on how to layout complex graphs in a

I think the lack of auto layout is actually a pretty significant part of the problem. It is an unsolved problem in data viz on how to layout complex graphs in a way that humans can parse. That also means that most humans are not very good at it. Personally my favourite VPL was Automator, which had the control flow primitives equivalent to the bash operators | and ;. This made layout and control flow trivial at the expense of expressiveness. However, as the goal of the thing was basically “terminal for the rest of us”, arguably those two operators are what most people end up using at the command line anyway. Of course Automator failed because of a number of other issues (lack of abstraction and bad package management I think are at the top of the list). But I think tools like that have a good amount of potential.