We need both. And more. Visual projection and editing is valuable when looking at a zoomed-out "components and wires" sort of architectural view. It's also good

We need both. And more. Visual projection and editing is valuable when looking at a zoomed-out "components and wires" sort of architectural view. It's also good for showing high-level overviews of a process, like various UML diagrams should have been. It can sometimes be used well for the nitty-gritty implementation details of a single unit, although this seems to be where a lot of it breaks down. But it's terrible for doing all of these things at once. And also, if you can control your level of detail/zoom well enough to do it right, you'd get similar benefits projecting to simpler text formats as well. What's most important is that all this stuff needs to be declarative. Not in the sense that you hide the order of operations within a block of code, in a way that final performance characteristics can become a surprise, but that the more complex structures of your project that organises the blocks into modules, classes, functions, records, etc need to be declarative, rather than an imperative set of instructions that build a structure at run-time (usually difficult or impossible to explore and instrument) which is later executed to achieve your actual goals.