Ultimately the goal of visual programming is to make life easier for the programmer. The drive to create visual programming systems is often explained by pointing to the intuitive and sophisticated nature of our biological visual systems. One true gift humans possess is a facility for quickly processing large amounts of visual information. Visual programming systems attempt to simplify programming by taking advantage of our powerful visual machinery.
As programming becomes easier, more people will learn to program. In an ideal world, non-programmers will routinely how to express their computing goals. Although the list is not exhaustive, I've tried to include systems that represent all major styles of visual programs.
Obviously with Visual programming, there is a need for a Visual Programming environment. The environment must spport the Viusal syntax and needs to allow the programmer to create, modify and examine programs. The most typical type of Visual Programming Environment is the windowed/mouse point-and-click type of setting.
The Visual Programming Environment will consist of a set of tools and a user interface for accessing the tools environment, so the each pictorally represented component can be manipulated. The Visual Programming Environment and the Visual Programming Language are usually tightly integrated with each other.