I think similar remarks can be made in regard to Jupyter notebooks and their popularity among scientist, engineers and data people. Yes, they are still more in the conventional programming realm, where the code is in the foreground, yet to some extent they bring more immediacy. The fact that you can look and investigate at the data you are dealing with at every step (print the table, make a plot etc) is powerful.
Another thing would be of course powerful REPL environments.
And there are also visual environments like Matlab's Simulink and Modelica. Can you write control algorithm or a bunch of differential equations in any language? Yes. But control engineer can just take a quick look at screenshot of a Simulink model and already have a good idea on what is going on there. This cannot be said about the code.
This may be rather unpopular among hackers, where TTY clones and vi emulation rules everything, but computers and software seem to me most powerful and enabling outside the usual coding context of putting streams of characters into the source file using a keyboard.
As developer starting coding in the 1980's, that always valued high level approaches to computing than plain bits and bytes, I find this a kind of tragedy, given that productive tools helps everyone.
I love a quote from from some VB folks, that while others laught of them using VB, they were laughing all the way to the bank themselves.
My only complaint about visual environments, is that not all offer modular tools, the EEE IC version of a module or function, some are quite primitive only allowing one screen for the whole flow.
I wonder what place will be left for the TTY clones and vi emulation folks, when everything on the system is driven by systems programmed in agentic tools, command line wizardry replaced by MCP like tools and such.
Even just regular matlab gives you some of that data immediacy because you can just ctrl-enter on a block of code which will execute just that block and show you results in the console. Very handy for seeing what various bits do to the data.
Another thing would be of course powerful REPL environments.
And there are also visual environments like Matlab's Simulink and Modelica. Can you write control algorithm or a bunch of differential equations in any language? Yes. But control engineer can just take a quick look at screenshot of a Simulink model and already have a good idea on what is going on there. This cannot be said about the code.
This may be rather unpopular among hackers, where TTY clones and vi emulation rules everything, but computers and software seem to me most powerful and enabling outside the usual coding context of putting streams of characters into the source file using a keyboard.