I've got an idea. Instead of using XML, which is incredily slow to parse and create, we could just use standard Perl data structures. We'll call them objects. Then we'll need a text language for writing the description of how to connect them. We'll call that Perl.

Okay, that was kind of mean. However, looking at your examples, I'm pretty sure that no one who isn't already a competent programmer will be able to do anything useful with this visual tool you're talking about. (Tokenizers?) Also, I find that Java developers often spend great amounts of effort building things that are only necessary because Java is so limiting. It's trivial to do code generation in Perl with the power of eval(), so why create an entirely new way to do it? Just define a simple API that Perl Beads objects must implement and make a Tk tool that can hook them up to each other.