It's just amazing why people continue to rehash old concepts.  The latest seems to be some wishful thinking about visual programming. 

Paul Brown makes some good observations about visual programming.  First, he mentions that a mixture of coding, modeling, scripting and visualization would be best.  Second, he correctly recognizes that visual programming has been around for a long time.

I wrote about this a while back ago "Visual Spaghetti and Round Tripping". The conclusion is that you should derive inspiration on how Eclipse does its stuff.  Eclipse seamlessly integrates intelligence and interactivity inside the text editor.  Yes, there are visual tools, however they serve more to support navigation and browsing than actual coding.  The key point is that the textual form is the core focus, and the visuals are merely different views of the textual form. 

That brings me back to my earlier blog.  The effort of casting business process orchestration and service coreography in XML form is a crude form of visual programming, and thus inherits its problems.  It doesn't scale and possibly its correctness is suspect.  The better approach is to start with a correct language and provide different views on this language.    

My solution would be to take javascript (i.e. Rhino), enhance it with higher level workflow constructs (that is use function combinators), possibly add a hygienic macro capability and then integrate it into a visual environment like Eclipse.  How does that plan sound like?