Yeah, I’ve always found this sort of Bret Victor argument weird: yes, perhaps more graphical tools are the future. However—in both writing and math, it seems like there’s a tendency to start with more pictographic notations (Egyptian hieroglyphs or Greek geometrical figures) and move towards more abstract notations (phonetic alphabets or algebraic notation). It’s not clear to me that attempting to reverse the trend and pictorializing programming languages actually benefits anyone, except when learning. it’s a bit like my experience learning Lisp: when I started out, I was really into indentation-based syntaxes that hide parentheses; once I started to internalize the structural editing tools, I discovered that the “cluttered” parenthetical notation was actually a reason _to_ use lisp and not something to be covered up.