Tersus - an open source, purely visual IDE for iPhone and web apps

I would far rather use this than code. I've mentioned http://synthmaker.co.uk/ (which includes code modules) before. For many applications the procedural emphasis of code may not be the best approach. I like Yahoo's Pipes tool for the same reason. DSP and (to some extent) circuit board designers use these kind of schematic, flow based applications a lot - it's basically the same idea as analog computing.

Remember flowcharts? If you're trying to do something complicated, a good way to approach it is sketch it visually and then refer back to your information or decision flow chart while punching in the code. When I first learned programming I thought how nice it would be to just draw the flowcharts in and build the program that way, but that would have been far too computationally intense. This is no longer the case.

Frankly, I'd rather let the computer do the work. I also grew up with log tables and slide rules (as well as walking up hill to and from school), and a prime joy of having a computer was to be able to automate much tedious pencil-and-paper calculation. To me, writing code is the tedious crap one has to do to implement ideas that are often most easily represented in schematic form. Ugly and flawed though these tools may seem at present, they seem vastly preferable to typing everything.

These questions remind me a bit of discussions about Emacs/Vi vs (your favorite modern IDE). Of course you can do truly amazing things in editors like Emacs. Just as people who knew Wordtsar* and WordPerfect could churn out documents at high speed with their advanced knowledge of key combinations. Just like with TeX or CSound you can produce amazingly specific renderings of typography or music, and where experts with these tools can wipe the floor with those namby-pamby WYSIWYG tools...and yet the vast majority of people are happy with the WYSIWYG tools and get more stuff done, because most people are not sufficiently masochistic as to want everything as abstracted as possible.

* accidental misspelling that was too good to correct :)

Of course, doing it the easy way means one will never be as hard core as someone who has mastered the techniques of working with high degrees of abstraction. On the other hand few programmers seem consumed by a burning urge to throw away their high level languages and libraries and hand-code everything in assembler, or hardware designers casting aside spice and breadboards in favor of writing out bessel equations for everything.

Tools like this can seem clumsy and restrictive at first, but all that's happening is that you're learning to deal with a visual grammar rather than one based on keywords and syntax. The underlying concepts of programming are just as portable and useful, and if you stick with it you might be surprised at how much a tool like this can do for your productivity. You will certainly find it a hell of a lot easier to see what is going than reading page of code for all but the simplest tasks.

tl;dr don't mistake your personal investment of time and effort for the best way of doing things.

Yes, you'll probably need to hack out some code to get things done. But it's not inevitable.

This http://kineme.net/files/Nord-Modular-30-large.jpg is the first-generation programming environment for the Nord Modular a (since discontinued) DSP-based representation f a modular analog synthesizer. No coding at all here - you have a bunch of modules, some of which are bitwise or digital, some of which are not. The configurations are referred to as patch files (after patch cables) - not to be confused with a code patch.

I don't want to go reinstalling the software, finding the file, and making screen captures (and I've since sold that keyboard), but I had a patch file that would let you play Asteroids when you plugged the audio output into an oscilloscope (or ran a softscope on on a computer). I would play by twisting two knobs (for heading and thrust) and hitting a piano key to fire, pew pew.

I think we could all agree that Asteroids, even a primitive implementation, involves logic. And although this might seem like a very perverse way to implement, there are many tasks oriented around signal or data flow for which the procedural approach to programming is equally perverse.

Look into http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analog_computer for more.

You know, if you download Apple's iPhone development environment, which is free, you can also "demo iPhone apps with no iPhone." It comes with a pretty decent iPhone simulator.