Overly "helpful" systems are adopted by people who don't bother to learn the domain before they make sweeping business decisions. And, strangely, once people do know the domain the last thing they want is a kindergarten toy where they program by clicking through menus. Imagine a novelist writing by navigating right-click menus of phrases organized by "Prepositional phrases", "Snappy responses", etc.
It's not that a GUI can't be helpful, it's that "GUI" isn't a synonym for helpful.
If there's a problem that can be solved by looking at a map (perhaps dataflow through components) then yes, it'd be great to present that visually.
The problem is that most of the people having this discussion know programming from movies like Hackers. They want a picture of an oil-tanker rolling over despite the fact that the code in question (theoretical code - never shown in the movie) wouldn't know what an oil tanker was, it'd simply react to one number changing by changing another. The meaning is all dependent on what platform it's installed on.
It is not easy to make GUI systems that are easy to use. Back before people were used to reading help on the internet there used to be a brisk market in 1000 page books with titles like "How to use Microsoft Word".
Closer to the domain my favorite example of malware is the ontology editor protoge. Every day I see freshers who are highly confused getting started with protoge who are then blown away with how easy it is to write an RDFS ontology in a few lines of Turtle with an ordinary text editor.
It's not that a GUI can't be helpful, it's that "GUI" isn't a synonym for helpful.
If there's a problem that can be solved by looking at a map (perhaps dataflow through components) then yes, it'd be great to present that visually.
The problem is that most of the people having this discussion know programming from movies like Hackers. They want a picture of an oil-tanker rolling over despite the fact that the code in question (theoretical code - never shown in the movie) wouldn't know what an oil tanker was, it'd simply react to one number changing by changing another. The meaning is all dependent on what platform it's installed on.