Saying "Visual programming will replace text-based programming" is like saying "Flowcharts will replace novels." People tend to prefer text over diagrams for an

Saying "Visual programming will replace text-based programming" is like saying "Flowcharts will replace novels." People tend to prefer text over diagrams for anything longer than a page, partly because text follows the structure of natural language. Another issue: it's hard to pretty print visual programs or to put them in any sort of canonical form. This makes it harder to read them--there's no way to enforce a consistent style. It also makes various processing tasks (e.g. diffing, merging) much harder.