Lion Kimbro's work is a deep rabbit hole. It's also led me to Bob Horn. For example, https://web.archive.org/web/20160411174943/http://web.stanford.edu/~rhorn/a/topic/cognom/scnrio=FtreOfHumanCognomeCL.pdf seems like an interesting counterpoint to Engelbart's "Augmenting Human Intellect".

No coordinate system. This medium only defines topology and contents of elements, not their location.

this aligns with David Harel’s thoughts on visual formalisms; geometry is secondary to topology. Mainly focusing how the relationship between entities in the visual language rather than their spatial position or size.

Had someone seen this clearly in 1980, and figured out how make a transparent two-way connection between Smalltalk space and text-file space, we might have seen a very different evolution of computing : a true synthesis of Smalltalk and Unix.

This resonates as well. Visual programming languages backed by a textual protocol seems really important. It sort of enables progressive enhancement of visual programming. By default everyone gets textual authoring, in the best case fully visual authoring.