> Have you ever read large electronic schematics? That's basically it .. except all the important things have to be identified by text anyway, because it's a ma

> Have you ever read large electronic schematics? That's basically it .. except all the important things have to be identified by text anyway, because it's a massive challenge to the imagination to come up with two hundred different pictograms. As a mechanical engineer who works with Labview and Simulink, as well as more conventional code (python mostly), that is indeed a very good description. First glance at a large labview program feels very much like first glance at a large and complex electronics schematic. Lots of wire everywhere and you're not even sure where to start. I think a nice "best of both worlds" approach is a graphical "high level" view which shows the flow of data, at least for "data transformation" kind of programs, and code for the low level logic (what actually happens in the blocks). Sort of like nodal editors in Blender and NLE apps. Fortunately Simulink makes it easy to drop in a Matlab function call, Labview not so much (need to get into C FFI or use a really old version of .net or something). The thought I have about spreadsheets (might have read that on here), is that spreadsheets make the data visible and hide the code. Text-based programming hides the data but shows the code. I'm not sure what something that makes both code and data first class and visible would look like, but I'd be curious for sure (for engineering type applications at least). Best I've found so far (and what I actually for a lot of data processing tasks) is a Jupyter notebook making plentiful use of df.head() and df.plot().