Yeah, I’ve always found this sort of Bret Victor argument weird: yes, perhaps more graphical tools are the future. However—in both writing and math, it seems like there’s a tendency to start with more pictographic notations (Egyptian hieroglyphs or Greek geometrical figures) and move towards more abstract notations (phonetic alphabets or algebraic notation). It’s not clear to me that attempting to reverse the trend and pictorializing programming languages actually benefits anyone, except when learning. it’s a bit like my experience learning Lisp: when I started out, I was really into indentation-based syntaxes that hide parentheses; once I started to internalize the structural editing tools, I discovered that the “cluttered” parenthetical notation was actually a reason _to_ use lisp and not something to be covered up.
You make a great point about notations becoming more abstract for more advanced use cases, indeed this may be a "natural" process. However I'd like to add nuance with the observation that Bret may not be suggesting that we reverse the trend from abstract notation back to concrete visualizations. Actually I think he is calling for a rich variety of visual/concrete notations and symbolic/abstract notations that work in concert together to express our dynamic concepts, and extending those with the use of the dynamism of the computing medium to add interactive aspects to the notations (ala "Magic Ink").
His talk "Media for thinking the unthinkable" goes into detail on this, especially from minute 10 to minute 17:
https://youtu.be/oUaOucZRlmE?t=600
The essay Magic Ink: INFORMATION SOFTWARE AND THE GRAPHICAL INTERFACE also goes into detail about this topic
http://worrydream.com/MagicInk/
