[tasteup]

Nice idea and the demo video looks great. But trying to replace typed syntax with a drag and drop GUI is going to be an up hill battle if you're trying to convert existing programmers. And from the demo video, it doesn't look like something a new programmer could pick up easily. So who is your target audience?

[murukesh_s]

Great question. We understand your concern, as we all know there is a dogma against drag & drop tools, which we believe is mostly due to the lack of quality open source implementations. We strongly believe we can change that. The benefits are many, like much better productivity and improved collaboration. The cons, if any (like doing diffs without the GUI) can be debated and worked around.

Though the paradigm as such can have greater benefits when applied to any place where programming or automation is required (like Robotics, IOT, Analytics etc), we are targeting general programmers (Web services to begin with). We didn't want to tie ourselves to a niche as we might lose an opportunity to make a huge impact. We believe we are really close to achieving that! (holding my breath as i am typing it).

Codeflow is clearly not intended as a toy language, like MIT Scratch. We have built some fairly complex web apps on Codeflow and they are running in production for like 5+ months, and it took us approx. 3-5x less effort to build them, as compared to in Node.js and was fun. With larger teams we see an even bigger impact.

If you think about it, it's not just a drag and drop GUI, it's really an advanced IDE that we are building. We seldom write algorithms anymore, we just reuse what is written. If you look at Node.js ecosystem, there are more than 200,000 public modules. Almost all of them have their documentation that is scattered across Readmes, docs and sometimes deep inside the source. Developers spent most of their time reading and understanding that. If you count the SaaS/API ecosystem, it might add another 10k. Imagine thousands of developers across the world going through the pain again and again. If you are an experienced developer, you might probably copy paste snippets and change the parameters from existing code. You can think of Codeflow modules as wrappers around those snippets that expose the API visually.

It will also work well with modern hardware innovations like touch screens and high resolution graphics, which are not leveraged well by traditional programming tools. I hope Codeflow, or an idea like it will eventually catch up with programmers. We are giving our best shot and so far we are very optimistic about bringing it to mainstream acceptance (fingers crossed) :-)