The talk will survey the highlights of work carried out in the last 30 years, regarding visual languages for the programming of reactive systems. I'll discuss the intra-object language of statecharts and the inter-object language of live sequence charts (LSC) with its play-in interface, as well as a non-visual counterpart thereof, based on Java. Some recent work on a natural language interface for LSCs and its combination with play-in will also be shown.