[johnw]

This reminds me of Quartz Composer[1] in a lot of ways: you wire the inputs and outputs of a bunch of different nodes together (called patches in QC) and each patch gets you a step closer to the solution. This seems to work especially well for graphics programming type problems where there are many different variables to tweak and you're applying many transformations to the image at each stage.

The problem is each component in the process still needs to be written in code. In QC I would often be frustrated when a patch didn't quite do what I needed and I had to keep trying to make my idea fit the limitations of the available patches.

So while this might help non-programmers understand on a big picture level what's happening, to go beyond that they're still going to have to learn how the individual components work which comes back to learning to code textually.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quartz_composer

[meemoo]

Diving in and editing the component-level JavaScript is a big part of the design. There will be much less friction than opening XCode.