That wasn't really the point of the article? The linked original blog post goes into that, but the point of this article was more about better representations and better abstractions in general, not about visual programming vs character based programming. For example, projectional editing can still be used to program in code, but what you're manipulating / storing is not the characters but the AST.
one line of code takes up exactly one line of text on screen. of which I have about 80, and I use two columns.
A visual language necessarily takes up more space.
I fail to see how a less efficient visual representation helps us look at more than a tiny subset of them.
That wasn't really the point of the article? The linked original blog post goes into that, but the point of this article was more about better representations and better abstractions in general, not about visual programming vs character based programming. For example, projectional editing can still be used to program in code, but what you're manipulating / storing is not the characters but the AST.