what I find interesting is how Excel is rarely mentioned in blog posts / articles about visual programming languages. Excel visualizes something interesting (data) but hides the “code”. Most VPL’s do the opposite and suffer I feel

Have you seen this? Excel is sometimes (or often even) given as an example of reactive programming. https://branch-blog.qlik.com/what-is-reactive-programming-a1e82cf28575

Also functional programming. See https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/excel-1.pdf. Simon Peyton Jones (Haskell, GHC, Microsoft Research) is a co-author.

@Glen Chiacchieri made a spreadsheet-inspired programming prototype called Flowsheets:

We had a lot of different visions for what Eve could be. Grid Eve was my preferred vision. Having a grid environment is one of my goals for my current language project Mech 🙂

Mech is such a good name. Super jealous you thought of it first!

Although not written for you techie folk, the landing page of my http://Object.Network project jumps right in with a spreadsheet angle, to explain what it is. I think those of us here (quite a few of us!) who are aiming our languages at non-techies would do well to start with spreadsheets and move forwards (at last!) from there.

The very cool literate editor Maria has a "cell" concept for reactive dataflow (see: https://www.maria.cloud/cells), but with a prose-centric framing typical of literate programming, rather than the grid of the spreadsheet.