In case of a down vote on something that seems reasonable

Perhaps it merely indicates that the voter doesn't agree about the reasonableness. I neither voted on nor---until now---read your comment but I do note that in general many people write things that they (evidently) consider reasonable but which I consider utter nonsense and other have vehemently disagreed with (what seem to me) to be reasonable statements by myself and others. Neither objective reasonableness (to the extent that such a thing exists) nor the belief of the author will force another to perceive it as reasonable.

and/or is non-inflammatory

Not especially inflammatory, true. I note however that you opened with a contradiction, "No.". That has a clear meaning of asserting the falsity of its parent. If the parent is (perceived to be) correct then a negation may be considered sufficient to downvote the comment with or without reading the remainder.

it'd be informative if someone left a note as to why it was being down voted.

This is a true statement. Another true statement is "Writing declarations of downvotes can be perceived as a nuisance by third parties and promote emnity or at very least dowvnoting by the downvoted author. This is a negative consequence for the downvoter, who is not obliged to abandon his or her anonymity if they don't chose to."

(I downoted both comments. OrphanWilde's assertion was mostly meaningless and given without substantiation/clarification, and your reply engaged it on object level instead of pointing that out (or silently downvoting), sustaining a flawed mode of discussion. Being "non-inflammatory" is an insufficiently strict standard, a conversation should be sane.)

Makes sense, thank you for the elaboration.

At this point I would like to make the comparison to flow charts and their interpreters (us), but even in this case, when we look at a flowchart (with the purpose of implementing something) we mentally substitute the boxes and flows with the code/libraries/interfaces for them. Then following this thought, if we had a compiler that could do the same when fed a diagram ie. parse it to generate the appropriate code, we'd be getting somewhere, I suppose. But as it stands I see why a diagram might not be enough to formally encapsulate all the data and state needed for execution.

We could definitely do better than a one dimensional string of ASCII characters for programming. See, for example, the following glorious mutant: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/APL_(programming_language%29 Check out Conway's game of life implementation further down on that page.

My pet issue is how difficult it is to have native support (both UI and data structure wise) for graphs in a programming language, given how ubiquitous graphs are in mathematics and computer science.