I guess what would be useful is a "Visual Basic for the web". Back in the day, one could bring up pretty large applications quite quickly using Visual Basic and Delphi.
What would be useful is an "Excel for web apps". The spreadsheet runtime model is much better adapted to the way non-developers think than what VB6-style visual programming provides.
Having code and actual application data allows people without programming experience to build data types and simple to average functions and debug errors in the business logic, whereas with classic code they can't get pass the parser to get their poorly written syntax understood by the compiler.
Developers tend to think that writing simple code makes application development easy, but actually learning the syntax and runtime model of classic imperative code is usually the hardest part to newcomers.
The functional-reactive execution of the spreadsheet together with the intermixing of data and code provides a simple mental model of instant evaluation and exploration, similar to the benefits a REPL provides to a seasoned developer, minus the syntax errors and deep nested structures.
Notebook-style development environments like observablehq.org are almost there (specially those with a spreadsheet-like semantics), though it still keeps too harsh a separation between the code environment and the "runtime values" environment - i.e. its cells are "too large" when compared to spreadsheet cells.
That's some food for thought. My issue with programming courses is they ask you to memorize the commands then use them; most programming is about creating the logic then QA'ing with some data. Excel is data-first and becomes more like a game, trying different approaches with a clear picture of the end in mind. It's easier to persevere.
Quite true, and too often developers are not aware of how important data-first is for their own work in the exploratory part of programming.
Programmers have powerful interactive shells and debug environments, yet most courses center the teaching and communication of how a program works around the concepts in the finished product (a working program), more than how you arrive piecewise to the full solution by iterating small parts of the concepts in the domain problem and finding the correct parts of code to handle them.
