[petercooper]

Yeah, Automator is essentially a sort of group of visual DSLs for some very defined domains. Your examples here are definitely more in the realm of general programming languages.

It's definitely not as easy as the environment you speculate, but Xcode and iOS development have been making big inroads lately, even with total beginners. Certainly, it could be made a lot easier, but efforts to do this in the past have tended to fall flat as people think that the skills they learn won't be useful in "real" environments later on.. which turns it into quite the chicken and egg problem :-)

I wonder, however, if JavaScript and Web oriented development environments will ultimately fill the gap you're identifying. The browser is an ideal environment for the tasks you outline, and JavaScript is a fine 'base' language for DSLs to fall on top of while still giving access to the full language.

[mohamedsa]

Yes, I do feel that JavaScript could be a very possible way towards achieving those goals :)