By "visual development environment", I do not mean Microsoft Visual Studio. I'm looking for a node-based IDE in which programs are constructed graphically and converted to plain text at compile time. The content of functions would still have to be typed out, of course, but everything else would be visual. Sort of like a flow chart that you type your code into directly.
I feel like this should exist but I can't seem to find anything like it.
There are tools which allow you to design your software using UML. Some of these tools include code generation capability (although as you say, you may have to enter code to implement decision points, etc).
One example is IBM Rational Rose. An open source example is ArgoUML.