The author doesn't mention LabVIEW, perhaps because he is not a scientist. LabVIEW is a visual programming language -- you construct software by connecting little icons together with wires.
LabVIEW has been around for decades and is a big success. Lots of science labs use LabVIEW, because (a) it's a National Instruments product and interfaces perfectly with National Instruments interface cards -- which have been the industry leaders for years; (b) it has drivers for every instrument ever; (c) the visual paradigm does work great for GUI design and layout. (Which shouldn't surprise anyone who has used XCode or Visual Studio.) Scientists love the ability to throw together a chart recorder application in ten minutes, and then wire it up to everything else in the lab, and LabVIEW works great for that particular use case.
Unfortunately, as you go beyond the most basic of computations or out of the environment's sweet spot -- in other words, as you try to use it as a general-purpose programming language -- LabVIEW just gets more and more painful. It has its own special vocabulary, semantics, and design patterns that are unlike everything else you've seen. Every time you want to define a subroutine you need to create a little icon for it, and define its arguments in terms of little panes on the icon. That's slow and painful and limiting; it makes writing Java in Notepad feel like luxury. But you have to stay disciplined and keep defining those subroutines, or your code will literally turn into spaghetti. Oh, the horrors I have seen. It's particularly awful if the code sprawls over more than one screen.
You can't effectively print out the code. It's hard to blog and hard to quote snippets from. To refactor you have to manually rearrange icons; there's a lot of time wasted laying things out. There's no way to use version control or create a patch. There's no search-and-replace.
Think of emacs. Now think of Notepad. Now think of something that is less useful than Notepad, to the same degree that Notepad is less useful than emacs. That's a visual programming language.