if you're interested in visual programming environments and try to look up prior efforts at all, you WILL find this sentiment to be true. It's somewhat depressing actually. You'll not just find all these cool sounding environments from the 80s that seemed light years ahead of today (or even something like Light Table), but you'll also find studies on the difficulties people faced with them and why they failed.

Text is not an easy thing to dislodge from the programmer's toolset.

My personal opinion keeps switching between "Text is basic and elemental, so it's the most natural way to represent code and therefore is the preferred" and "We havent built tools good enough or representations revolutionary enough (or scalable enough) and that's why text remains preferred".

I can see how someone who's built a non-textual programming environment can come to a "been there, done that" kind of attitude. Just take his enthusiasm at new attempts at the problem as a more pertinent response and ignore the rest.