[sanjiva]

I'm leading the Ballerina language design. The team has about 15 engineers working on the runtime (and related tools) and about another 15 folks working on the browser-based composer and the IDE plugins.

Ballerina's design point is to be a language with semantically equivalent text and graphic syntaxes. Its not a "visual language" really .. its a language with alternative syntaxes, one text and one graphic.

That approach eliminates the "hit-the-wall" phenomenon of visual languages. And as other commenters have said, a lot of the graphical view is useful to understand overall structure and less to write lots of code. However, parallel code is much better visualized graphically as sequence diagrams are dead simple to grok.

In terms of speed of the current Composer .. still WIP. Help is welcome :).