Bret Victor is working on some amazing stuff right now. I suggest his talk Drawing Dynamic Visualizations to see how he’s making programing more direct and less “code”-ish: http://vimeo.com/66085662

Editors and IDE's that do code high lighting make finding some types of bug much easier.

I can recall the old days of printing out on fan fold paper and going through with a highlighter to debug a missing " or }