Url: http://codeflow.co/ (There is a demo video)
Codeflow is an attempt at changing the way we program computers.
Most of the current programming languages are inherited from the command-line era of the 1970s. The personal computing industry have moved a lot since. The GUI revolution triggered by the mouse, touch screen interfaces triggered by the iDevices, the VR/AR & gesture/voice based interfaces of today and so on. But programmers are still stuck with a keyboard, are forced to remember the exact syntax & commands and type things character by character, to perform even basic tasks. The resulting stream of text isn't pretty and doesn't convey well even to a fellow coder.
In Codeflow, you program by wiring independent modules on a visual canvas. The Input interface of each module is visual and therefore self-documented. We invented a completely visual expression language to connect the pieces together. As a side effect, the 'code' will always looks like your brainstorming diagram.
Think of a modules as a mobile app. The same way you don't read a manual to operate so many mobile apps, you don't need a manual to figure out the configuration for individual modules, be it querying a mongo db or setting up an http listener. You definitely need an understanding of the concepts of every component, but you don't ever need to learn the syntax or read docs for interfacing with the component.
It wasn't easy, we almost took three years developing it but we believe we have achieved what we dreamed of. Apart from doing several internal projects, we also convinced and worked closely with two startups to launch their backend stack on Codeflow (http://tailslife.com, http://plento.co).
Codeflow will be opening for public soon and will be fully open sourced. Please upvote if you think Codeflow should be part of YC.
p.s. If you are interested in using the platform for your next or current work, please reach out to me - murukesh@codeflow.co.
I think a possible way to a success is creating a domain-specific language tailored for enterprise users. I think it would be extremely hard to win "real" programmers with a visual language. There's a huge cultural clash of the traditional programming centered around text (editors, VCS, build systems, Unix integration etc.) and visual GUI tools that are just from a different world.
So a tool for visually building a mobile app by a non-programmer from some pre-built "blocks" - yes. A general-purpose programming language - not a chance. Why being forced to use your GUI tool, when the same structure can be represented in text and thus supported by the multitude tools that are known for decades?
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_programming_language