You can view sophisticated IDEs and refactoring tools as an attempt to improve the interface to plain text representations of code. These have actually had quite a bit of success.
Some approaches that move away from editing code as plain text have had success in particular domains. Visual Programming has shader graphs, Houdini, Unreal Blueprints, Substance Designer and other niches where it is relatively successful. Literate Programming has Jupiter notebooks and Mathematica that are popular in certain domains. Most of the success seems to come in particular niches, it's hard to think of widely adopted examples for "general" programming.
And Excel of course is a very successful non text based programming model within many domains.
- Intentional Programming: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intentional_programming
- Light Table: http://lighttable.com/ (inspired by some ideas from Bret Victor: http://worrydream.com/)
- Visual Programming (lots of examples)
- Literate Programming
You can view sophisticated IDEs and refactoring tools as an attempt to improve the interface to plain text representations of code. These have actually had quite a bit of success.
Some approaches that move away from editing code as plain text have had success in particular domains. Visual Programming has shader graphs, Houdini, Unreal Blueprints, Substance Designer and other niches where it is relatively successful. Literate Programming has Jupiter notebooks and Mathematica that are popular in certain domains. Most of the success seems to come in particular niches, it's hard to think of widely adopted examples for "general" programming.
And Excel of course is a very successful non text based programming model within many domains.