The "Visual" in "Visual Programming Language" is about the graphical, interactive method of creating and understanding programs, rather than merely the visibility of textual or graphical code.
Spreadsheets typically show the entire formula of the selected cell at the top of the window, at the full width of the window.
Visual programming languages based on outliners and notebooks, like UserLand Frontier, Jupyter, or Mathematica, let you hide the code by closing the outlines or code editor views.
Ivan Sutherland's pioneering PhD thesis "Sketchpad" didn't show code or formulas or constraints on the screen all the time either, focusing on the graphical content itself that you were creating and editing and programming with direct manipulation, demonstration, and constraints, instead of just the code.
>This video is a TV show made about the software Ivan Sutherland developed in his 1963 thesis at MIT's Lincoln Labs, "Sketchpad, A Man-Machine Graphical Communication System", described as one of the most influential computer programs ever written. This work was seminal in Human-Computer Interaction, Graphics and Graphical User Interfaces (GUIs), Computer Aided Design (CAD), and contraint/object-oriented programming. While watching this video, remember that the TX-2 computer (built circa 1958) on which the software ran was built from discrete transistors (not integrated circuits -it was room-sized) and contained just 64K of 36-bit words (~272k bytes).
