Text isn't as important as language itself, but there's the rub: no one has yet devised a better way to program computers than language. Even the so-called "vis

Text isn't as important as language itself, but there's the rub: no one has yet devised a better way to program computers than language. Even the so-called "visual environments" we see today ultimately boil down to recognizable linguistic concepts: they do it by arranging shapes in space rather than writing text, but you can pick out the same nouns, verbs, and other parts of speech. And that's the problem. Visual environments are trying to represent language, and they're just not as good at it as text, which is the closest thing to a native format yet devised for the stuff. Eventually the inefficiencies start to get annoying, people go for the greater efficiency of text, and the visual environment languishes. The bottom line is that visual environments will never be as good as text for representing programming languages. Rather than trying to do language better than text, they need to find a paradigm that's better than language, and implement that. I don't have any clue what something like that would even look like; to be honest, I'm not sure it can even be done. But the greatest victories against the most hopeless-seeming odds are won by changing the whole nature of the fight, and that's what visual programming is going to have to do.