One of the remnants of the Buran to this day is an ancestor of its programming environment -- DRAKON. It is a visual programming language. Unlike others, it seems this one has had quite a bit of thought put into it.
I don't think it is enough to make it popular, but it is nevertheless an interesting niche. There is a small community still building and exploring it.
There is a DRAKON editor, with target languages like Javascript, Erlang, C++ and others. Here is the DRAKON editor program:
He talks about visual programming languages. He defines provocative terms like "intellectual terrorism" and how information overload (he calls it "information stress") is akin to terrorism for the minds of workers tasked to tease out the solution to the problem. It often stems from an impedance mismatched between old methods of solving problems and processing information and the new type and amount of information available. Mind you this was written in the 80's before big data. His environment was building tools to write the avionics system for Buran. Many of the engineers involved were not computer scientists, there were mechanical, chemical, airspace engineers. He was probably wondering how to get them to program better and how to make the whole process more efficient and less stressful for them.
i have never seen this programming environment. its a fascinating concept which resembles the Scratch project out of MIT.
modern scripting languages make iterating software much simpler. however, there are times when i feel having a drag and drop gui such as this to assemble complex operations would be really helpful. i know of modeling tools such as UML are used in the planning phase. but wouldn't it make sense to have a high level overview of your software? is there anything like this for python, javascript, or ruby?
Drag and drop interfaces can be a beautiful thing, but they're most effective when in a split-screen environment with the flowchart on one side and the code it compiles into previewed on the other side. The script being visible as the diagrammatic design changes lets the coder see what's going on behind the scenes, and lets him understand the structure so that he can tweak it in the next stage to do the many things that the GUI designer didn't anticipate.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DRAKON
I don't think it is enough to make it popular, but it is nevertheless an interesting niche. There is a small community still building and exploring it.
There is a DRAKON editor, with target languages like Javascript, Erlang, C++ and others. Here is the DRAKON editor program:
http://drakon-editor.sourceforge.net/
EDIT: (adding some interesting translated tid bits from Parondjanov's writings)
If you happen to speak Russian it is also quite an interesting read to go over author's (Parondjanov) writing on programming in general:
http://drakon.pbworks.com/w/page/18205516/FrontPage
He talks about visual programming languages. He defines provocative terms like "intellectual terrorism" and how information overload (he calls it "information stress") is akin to terrorism for the minds of workers tasked to tease out the solution to the problem. It often stems from an impedance mismatched between old methods of solving problems and processing information and the new type and amount of information available. Mind you this was written in the 80's before big data. His environment was building tools to write the avionics system for Buran. Many of the engineers involved were not computer scientists, there were mechanical, chemical, airspace engineers. He was probably wondering how to get them to program better and how to make the whole process more efficient and less stressful for them.