I wish there was a programming equivalent as simple and visual as Excel, to prototype real apps with. There are several 'no-code' tools that use a Google Sheet

I wish there was a programming equivalent as simple and visual as Excel, to prototype real apps with. There are several 'no-code' tools that use a Google Sheet as a starting point (Glide Apps), but ultimately the code runs on their databases, and you end up not knowing what the actual business logic would look like in Javascript. Even tools like Wappler, that offer a visual layer to build functions, and lets you export and deploy the code yourself, will use their own helper functions to abstract the complexity away from users.