At its core, a programming environment provides a link between a formal system and some aspect of our world. You could think of a general purpose Computer as providing a link between any formal system and the aspects of our world that it ties int, but we can limit ourselves to programming environments for simplicity of discussion.

With that perspective, we can ask what representations of a formal system do we find easy to manipulate in ways that produce results that are significant for us (in a specific problem context).

A visual representation would certainly be a better match for a spatial problem domain (Sutherland's work, for example). Similarly, an audio representation can work well for an audio domain (ex: beardyman's realtime performance system he presents in his ted talk). Likewise, I'm quite sure a system for exploring cuisine art would match a "smell representation".

The notion of a "universal turing machine" guarantees that all of these representations can be mapped to that of a symbol stream. That is a mathematical result, but which representations appeal to humans involved in various kinds of work is not a mathematical question - it is a HCI question.