One of the startups I'm CTOing is working on exactly that problem, or rather, has worked on it and is commercializing the solution.
Logo[0] (the language for children) is actually more complex and abstract than what we've got, which isn't a language at all, but closer to a spreadsheet for code, except...people don't even know they are coding, much less using what everyone here would call a debugger. They're just doing stuff that, if you were a computer scientist, you would recognize as coding.
I'm pretty excited about it, we're beta testing with an 800 person company in Australia at the moment, and hope to go into a general release over the summer. I think it's similar in significance to the business world as the spreadsheet, which allowed non-programmers to do number crunching. Our stuff allows non-programmers to do the vast majority of business automation and back office coding being done today.
One of the startups I'm CTOing is working on exactly that problem, or rather, has worked on it and is commercializing the solution.
Logo[0] (the language for children) is actually more complex and abstract than what we've got, which isn't a language at all, but closer to a spreadsheet for code, except...people don't even know they are coding, much less using what everyone here would call a debugger. They're just doing stuff that, if you were a computer scientist, you would recognize as coding.
I'm pretty excited about it, we're beta testing with an 800 person company in Australia at the moment, and hope to go into a general release over the summer. I think it's similar in significance to the business world as the spreadsheet, which allowed non-programmers to do number crunching. Our stuff allows non-programmers to do the vast majority of business automation and back office coding being done today.
[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logo_(programming_language)