Stop Writing Dead Programs is a great talk about some legacy features that modern programming languages keep (and so we keep using them) from the times of punchcards.
I’d a bit argue with the ending, though. I believe in visual programming languages too but I think it’s quite a big leap there from how we program now. Some people go all-in for visual languages, some say to always bet on text. I think the trick is to find the balance there, and the next big language is something like Node-RED (with visual representation of high-level flow and text representation of logic inside of each function) rather than Enso where everything is visualized. I’d like to see better structure and navigation for modules and functions, as it was in smalltalk, and more interactive development, as it was in lisp. The ideas aren’t new, we just need to get them back into modern languages. I’m currently deceiving a plan to get Livebook (Jupyter but better and for Elixir) to that level 🤔