My experience with simulink and labview suggests that there can be a place for visual programming at the architectural level. Taking Matlab modules and linking them together into some sort of feedback loop pipeline can be very useful for explaining to non-technical team members, and I find that little bit of 2d visualization latches itself into my brain much differently than if it were text. With simulink/Matlab, I think this is partially because Matlab is such a bad language from a software engineering perspective (it's really not meant for large programs).
Maybe there's a place for for text and visual languages together, I'm not sure. Sometimes I have the feeling while staring at an editor with 3 text files on screen that a huge chunk of my brain is sitting on the wayside collecting dust. Yes, there is some amount of visual/spatial thought involved in navigating text, and maybe even mapping that text/project onto an abstract visual space, but I doubt this really takes full advantage of our extremely powerful visual cortex.
Maybe there's a place for for text and visual languages together, I'm not sure. Sometimes I have the feeling while staring at an editor with 3 text files on screen that a huge chunk of my brain is sitting on the wayside collecting dust. Yes, there is some amount of visual/spatial thought involved in navigating text, and maybe even mapping that text/project onto an abstract visual space, but I doubt this really takes full advantage of our extremely powerful visual cortex.