So to come full circle: representations do matter, and there is still, despite historical failings, an opportunity for visual representations to improve comprehensibility. It's easiest to see when you look at learners, but they needn't be the only ones to enjoy the possible benefits. Give me a few weeks to produce a demonstration of the kind of representations I'm talking about and maybe it will be easier to believe my argument.

Did you see PANE? http://joshuahhh.com/projects/pane/ It’s a kind of visual syntax for normal functional programming with let-items and expressions. One difference from normal “boxes and arrows” is that data visually flows into one destination and any splits are via named variables (just like let-items and expressions)

I hadn't - thank you for the link. Looks like an interesting hybrid.

Looking forward to it! I have a similar point of view -- see my previous comment (and the one following it): https://futureofcoding.slack.com/archives/C5T9GPWFL/p1556637997315900?thread_ts=1556460551.243800&cid=C5T9GPWFL