Note: marked as community wiki.
Is there a good analysis of why visual programming languages still haven't taken off? We're still coding these days 'linearly' in a 80x25 text window; while the concepts we represent (data structures, algorithms) seem like they can be more intuitively represented visually.
An 80x25 text window? Really? Not to compare sizes, but my text window is quite a bit bigger than that. But regardless of that, I personally can't imagine a visual programming language that would satisfy me. For technical information, text is far more information-dense than video. I would much rather skim an article about a technical subject than watch a video about that subject in five times as much time (seriously guys, knock it off with the videos already).
In a similar way, I would much rather spend a few seconds typing a few lines of code, than a few minutes dragging and dropping things around to accomplish the same thing. It's about conciseness, and expressiveness. Visual programming languages just don't have it, in my experience. Good for teaching fundamentals of programming? Sure. Alice is pretty neat. But not for day-to-day work.
On a somewhat-related note, Code Bubbles is an interesting take on improving the "80x25 text window".
Dont forget with VS 2010 (.NET 4), its now multi monitor supported, which mean you can now allow editors, designers and tool-windows to be moved outside the top-level window and positioned anywhere you want across to any monitor on your system.
Two approaches to programming that aren't just simple text come to mind:
I think Structured Editing is pretty interesting, because it takes the 'braces with idententation' convention, which has proven really useful for keeping code organized, to its logical extreme. I think it could really be something, if someone were to make a brilliant (from a usability perspective) implementation of it.
The LabView approach, on the other hand, doesn't excite me so much. The visual idioms don't seem powerful and obvious enough, compared to text. I haven't used LabView much though, so it's probably better than I think.
There is quite some mixing and matching.
For instance, people do use GUI editors like NetBeans Matisse or VS.Net because some things are easier to draw than to code. Some people use GUI data model editors: it's much easier, faster and (I would argue) produces a better result than writing DDL. Even when you write code, you have all sorts of graphical tools to help you understand what you're doing (the eclipse hierarchy view, for example).
On the other hand, we do still use similar text editors to the ones people used 30 years ago for a lot of our work. :) It's obvious that there is value to be had from both.