Textual vs. Graphical representation was a recurring theme at this years Code Generation Conference. Thankfully, we seem to have moved beyond the “models are graphical, code is textual” misconception. The discussions were more focused on the relative strengths and weaknesses of each.
Arno Hasse and Sven Efftinge categorised it really nicely: graphics are best for visualisation, text is best for editing. There's been some work to integrate the two; for example, it's now possible in Eclipse to generate both graphical and textual editors that act on the same underlying model simultaneously. Marcus Volter has also demonstrated generating graphical visualisations automatically from models using a couple of auto-generation tools (graphviz and prefuse).
Outside of software development tools, this is nothing new: Autocad has for years allowed designers to create drawings with textual commands. Whilst users can draw directly on the canvas, they can also use a textual dsl enter commands - such as lineto(20,100) - with the results rendered graphically.
It would be good to think software tooling will catch on to these possibilities - and it looks like Openarchitectureware may be in the vanguard.
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