Underlying great creations that you love—be it music, art, or technology—its form (what it looks like) is driven by an underpinning internal logic (how it works). I noticed this pattern while watching a talk on cellular automaton and realized it's "form follows function" paraphrased from a slightly different angle. Inventing a form is a hard task, so you must approach it obliquely—by first illuminating the underlying function.
This made me realize something crucial about visual programming: it’s stuck on form, rather than letting form follow function. Visual programming has long been trapped in the node-and-wires paradigm because its designers are overly fixated on form, neglecting the underlying function that should drive it. So as a whole, the field is stuck in a local minima. How can we break out of it and how can we find a function for the field that underpins the form?
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Is this useful? Answer depends on our task at hand. There's no one-size-fits-all visualization of entities. What if I told you bar is an x-coordinate and baz is the y-coordinate? Now, perhaps a visualization that's more fitting is a scatterplot where each instance is represented as an x. We put the relationship between bar and baz in a spatial relationship to see if our visual cortex could recognize a pattern.
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[2] Depending on who you are, this can sound either like object-oriented programming or category theory.
https://interjectedfuture.com/visual-programming-is-stuck-on-the-form/