Comment by hermitShell

I maintain some FPGA code in VHDL and also some C code for microcontroller. One thing I appreciate immensely about VHDL is how strict it is. You have no option but to think carefully about modularity and heirarchy. By comparison C is very free and simply offers the opportunity to make your own constraints.

Notably the mental model of the hardware is different for each case. Other species of languages like Lisps and Golang and SIMD fascinate me because computer hardware fascinates me.

I like the toy 2D textual experiment the author has given us, and I agree with you it would not scale. Since the author calls their toy 'goofy' they probably agree. But I would contest (edit: your point that we are not stuck in our ways.) We are by and large seriously stuck in our ways. Even if a perfect visual/spatial programming language dropped into our laps today, I posit it would take over 50 years to meaningfully supplant C et al..