The Einstein example is a non sequitur. This isn't a technical, algorithmic or scientific problem that needs special genius. Where's the 3D rendering of Relativity that makes E=MC2 perfectly comprehensible for the masses? Or is that defeatist?

Neither is the problem with representation. We've had 3D visualization for years -- spaghetti flying at you in perfectly rendered HD 3D is still spaghetti.

The problem is not with the technology, but in the subjective perception of complex domains, and the real world fact that codebases tend to be more unclear than not, acquire massive amounts of technical debt, and even the cleanest codebases, in pure Uncle Bob and GOF-approved architectural clarity, present a cognitive domain that requires a lot of specialization to understand.

It's like saying -- what if the problem with understanding French is that we need better visual representations of French? Cool -- that might help the French and other Francophiles, but it doesn't remove the conceptual barrier and basic training required to understand the underlying language.

Likewise, if I presented you with a perfect 3D model (whatever that means) of my pub/sub solution built with a Reactor Pattern that messages N number of clients and takes asynchronous events from N number of other clients and persists the results of processing those messages in a sorting algorithm to a key-sorted Hash inside a NoSQL store -- you'd still have to have the conceptual vocabulary and experience to have any idea what was going on.

In other words, the issue is not an extrinsic problem that needs innovation, but a subjective problem of conceptualization that floats independent of language and implementation.

I love Steve Jobs' attitude and take inspiration from it -- he put user experience and elegance over the needs of programmers. But let's stay with Jobs for a minute. Because he was focused on user-centric experiences, the tools he left developers were serviceable but mostly afterthoughts. It was up to coders to service tools, not the other way around. XCode is not widely admired as an IDE, Objective-C is a good language but has its warts, and in general Jobs himself didn't see the biggest challenge as technical or code-centric, his innovations were mainly a finely-tuned intuition for the difference between elegant and simplistic, combined with a will, attention to detail and leadership drive to make those intuitions reality. He simplified touch interfaces, and left coders mostly to their own challenges, and I think he was right on with those priorities. In that, he totally "shared my attitude".

I do have an open mind, or I wouldn't still be coding and pushing myself to learn decades after scribbling out my first lines of BASIC on a TRS-80. But I also have enough experience with many, many codebases and have spent years learning techniques for simplifying and expressing complex domain problems. And the class of visual representation of those domains, of which NoFlo is just one more iteration, has very limited utility in that regard.

Is it possible that a better visual vocabulary for code will come along? Sure, why not? But it will be of a completely different class than what we've been presented with so far, and it certainly won't have been invented by IBM in the 70s.