When a programmer says "I want visual programming" I think it's often one of those situations where 1) the asker has correctly identified a pain point, but 2) the thing they are asking for isn't necessarily the right way to do it.

Instead of a box-and-lines diagram, I think the stuff that people really want is:

- Structured editing. Valid change operations are obvious (maybe listed in a menu). No invalid states.

- Cross-cutting connections are explicitly displayed (with lines or arrows or etc) instead of being implicit.

- UI does a better job of highlighting just the relevant information and hiding everything else.

- Overall more simplicity. As in, I think some people imagine that their thousand-lines-of-code project could be fully represented as a few boxes and lines with labels. There's some unrealistic expectations tied up in this area. But simplicity is still a good goal.

Those are all good goals and there's different approaches to solve them. A lot of those asks can be solved by keeping the text document interface and adding enough cleverness on top of that (like EVE / LightTable). And there's other visual systems other than boxes-and-lines. People just need to think outside the box. (ha ha, sorry)