One advantage of textual languages: they provide a patina of respectability. If I make a rube goldberg machine that can pick from a set of rectangles, that's an esolang. If I make a rube goldberg machine that can pick from a set of words, that's a hash table and I can write papers about it. The illusion of transmitting knowledge is a powerful thing. And , for all its impact, doesn't seem to put a dent there.

I remember back to the beginning of FoC, one problem that Steve Krouse identified with Scratch is that bigger kids didn't see it as real programming.