If the pointing and clicking generates code that can seen and stored, then fine. A reproducibility problem comes from the fact that most point-and-click tools don't. As a computational biologist who uses R I am often frustrated by experimental colleagues who use Excel and often can't remember how they transformed the data months later. I don't necessarily have better memory but I can go into my script and look.

In scripting languages, writing and sharing a new function isn't hard. And, if the language is open source, that encourages the rapid development of a community which implements useful and state-of-the-art tools.

If every tool needs to be available through a GUI, then, as far as I can see, that GUI will either be a burden on creators or so generalized it's no better than tab completion.

I'm worried about seeing a script that says

    df = read_csv(file)
    df <- df %>% mutate(log_income = log(income))
    # do manipulations in shiny
    Shiny(df)
    # click "transform" in the top right hand corner...

Point and click is fine for EDA, but it’s inherently manual.

Repeating those manual steps gets boring very quickly, and is also error prone.

You can try and have the GUI generate code, but automatically generated code is awful.

We have had few point&click text-based systems in the past, notably Plan9 and Xerox Alto and only the letter have a complete "user friendly graphic programming environment"... I think a simpler approach like org-mode/org-babel is the best we have now out of the box.