[quote name='Antheus' timestamp='1300465020' post='4787529']
[quote name='speciesUnknown' timestamp='1300463542' post='4787516']However, its quite simple to get non programmers to understand the basics of structured programming in this way, so its not a dead loss.

Non-programmers are irrelevant. They don't work in industry, they don't contribute, they are hobbysts. That's fine.

But "real" programmers have deadlines to keep up, have to deal with moronic real world requirements and need to maintain even 20 year old codebases. In general, it's known as "works in real world".
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Except every programmer was at one point a non-programmer. Failing to contribute immediately to precious business deadlines does not by any stretch of the imagination make something totally worthless. Of course using the wrong tool for the job will always cause problems, but that doesn't mean that the tool itself is the problem.
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But that's the point; by the time you're getting paid for a living there's people who are skilled programmers. The difference in salary between a skilled programmer and a non-programmer isn't so much to make up for the vast deficiencies that these sort of systems entail for pretty much every real world scenario. They often times require skilled programmers to do scripting to fill in the blanks, or circumvent the inevitable limitations of the UI. They're barely maintainable (which adds cost to business). They're hard to debug (which adds cost to business). They add on-boarding time compared to a programmer using a mainstream language (which adds cost to business). And they very often take longer to actually do things in, which offsets the salary difference anyways.

For all practical purposes, the tool is the problem; or at least this tool has no job. Maybe something that is throw-away-ish code that has limited operations, and follows that nice workflow pattern, but needs non-technical specialists like an art pipeline or sound effect mixer or something might be suited to this, but...