The type of visual programming you're suggesting seems to exist in an extreme form as the apps we use to read and write data, like Facebook, Trello, etc. On the other end of the spectrum we have the very technical savvy that want more direct control of what's going on. There's a lot of middle ground that's been covered, from both ends of the stack. I don't think the idea of visualizing things to be more material is flawed, but surely you could overdo it or apply the wrong model at the wrong level of abstraction.
All of our programming is visual.
We rely on a set of visual units of some manageable size (an alphabet of characters), and then we compose them sequentially into strings (visual units of a more general alphabet)
Stringing units together makes sense based on the way we experience a limited bandwidth of signal over time.
While listening, signal is presented one unit of the sequence at a time. When reading, we are presented with a whole page of characters at a time. The surrounding area is displayed, and we can move the focus around at will.
This leads to the development of the visualization models/techniques that we progress from simple features like spaces between words; parentheses/curly braces to group words; indentation of blocks to group/subordinate them, forming trees.
The idea of the unit/object/thing, composed of unit/object/things is thematic.
Files are units of text that are read/written one at a time. Eventually you stop directly typing, and you enter a different level of abstraction, where the units are displayed and manipulated with a different set of controls.
I think this is the point where the flowchart (directed graph) model fits in with the text focused model.
In Sublime, I like having the directory outline view and the zoomed-out scrollbar view with whatever single page of text I'm viewing. I think it'd be cool if these three were integrated, so that I open and close the files in a flowchart in the plane, where edges/arrows represent organization and dependencies. I'd like to import a module by dragging an arrow from one node to another
The claim you cite is essentially a statement of preference regarding a matter of naming/categorization/semantics.
Suppose you were to distinguish some subset of the Universe, labeling it "sadness"; what sets of things would belong in that subset?
Some might consider "sadness" to be a subset of "emotion experienced by a human", which seems pretty reasonable.
The things perceived by the sad person, the things enacted by the sad person--these things are hard to cleanly cut/isolate from the experiencing of emotion of sadness.
The persons experience of sadness is definitely the center of "sadness", but I could imagine expanding "sadness" to include also the inputs and the outputs of that moment, e.g. a sad story. If there were no people left to experience the Adagio, the Adagio would be what was left of the people; I feel comfortable considering it a part of that "sadness"-branch of the human event.
If we find some thing A not really related to "sadness", I can still call thing B as "sadness"
If you consider soul, will, life to be attributes only of humans, you are distinguishing us to be super special. Is my reading a text that changes the way I cycle/move through spacetime so innately different from the collision of two masses? If we allow soul, will, life to apply to the other things that move, we can find the parallels that show humans as an emergent part of nature, whose behavior fits the general scheme of things.
If I am conscious of a flashing light when I register it in my mind, my mind/brain responding to it some regular way, then is not a rock conscious of the earth when it accelerates towards it? Maybe the rock isn't conscious of its own consciousness of the Earth, but it's definitely conscious of the Earth.
Consciousness has connotations of the complexity of human thought, but the crux of it is interaction/cause-effect/perception-action.
I'm pretty sure humans are made of the same stuff as everything else, stuff that we perceive patterns in, but that ultimately transcends our interpretation of it.
All of our programming is visual.
We rely on a set of visual units of some manageable size (an alphabet of characters), and then we compose them sequentially into strings (visual units of a more general alphabet)
Stringing units together makes sense based on the way we experience a limited bandwidth of signal over time.
While listening, signal is presented one unit of the sequence at a time. When reading, we are presented with a whole page of characters at a time. The surrounding area is displayed, and we can move the focus around at will.
This leads to the development of the visualization models/techniques that we progress from simple features like spaces between words; parentheses/curly braces to group words; indentation of blocks to group/subordinate them, forming trees.
The idea of the unit/object/thing, composed of unit/object/things is thematic.
Files are units of text that are read/written one at a time. Eventually you stop directly typing, and you enter a different level of abstraction, where the units are displayed and manipulated with a different set of controls.
I think this is the point where the flowchart (directed graph) model fits in with the text focused model.
In Sublime, I like having the directory outline view and the zoomed-out scrollbar view with whatever single page of text I'm viewing. I think it'd be cool if these three were integrated, so that I open and close the files in a flowchart in the plane, where edges/arrows represent organization and dependencies. I'd like to import a module by dragging an arrow from one node to another