I am a massive fan of Bret Victor and his talks. 'Up and down the ladder of abstraction' [0] was eye opening for me, and has informed my pedagogical style ever since.
I think, though, even though I agree broadly with what he has to say on visual programming and gaining an intuitive understanding of what programmes do, I feel like the emphasis he puts onto areas he feels are weaknesses are not the areas that I feel are the areas that are most in need of tooling.
Let me explain.
Victor puts a lot of emphasis on real-time visualisation of outputs, dedicating a lot of time in his talks [1] to drawing a tree and showing how visually representing how the code is drawing onto the canvas allows for greater exploration of ideas and possibilities, whilst creating a greater mental link between code and screen.
I agree that having this link is useful, but I think what it disregards is the amount of effort that it takes to get to a situation where you have an interactive real-time IDE for the purposes of drawing a tree. True, there is a deeper point he is trying to make about making ideas more visual, but the examples he uses and the aspects of modern computing that he criticises doesn't generalise well without a lot of interpretation.
He says in the closing paragraph of the featured article that these "are not training wheels" and that this is how all programming should be, but I think it would actually only be helpful in a subset of contexts, and commercially viable to invest in the tooling required in only a very small subset of cases.
I feel like a more applicable use of this IS training wheels - interactive explainables that can bring a topic or a concept to life which can then be applied to a number of different contexts that will then not need specialist software or tooling to facilitate. Examples would be Stephen Wittins [2], Betterexplained [3], Red Blob Games [4] or Nicky Case [5]
[0] http://worrydream.com/LadderOfAbstraction/
[1] https://vimeo.com/71278954
[2] https://acko.net/blog/how-to-fold-a-julia-fractal/
[3] https://betterexplained.com/articles/intuitive-convolution/
[4] https://www.redblobgames.com/pathfinding/a-star/introduction...
I agree with your view, but one of the reasons for this is that there is still a lot to ask from the GUI frameworks in most languages (especially languages like C++ and Rust). However, I still believe that this can change.
Raph Levien is driving some pretty targeted work on pushing the state of GUI frameworks for Rust [0].
In C++ Dear ImGui is heavily used by the game development community [1]. My experience is that it is really fast to get a visualization for most projects going in very little time using this framework. See the gallery threads [2] for examples. This project also gets better every month.
[0]: https://raphlinus.github.io/rust/druid/2020/09/28/rust-2021....