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The medium is part of it. A huge number of programming language features stem around the fact that we make text files the human interface. "Clicking things" is not the next step because clearly keyboards are faster. Imagine something more like a "notion for code" where things are 1) clearly keyboard focused 2) clearly being stored as structured data not plain utf8 text.

Comments, build configuration, platform specific implementations, alternate implementations (e.g. (re)implementations of an interface used by an application), tests, and etc. could all be part of the "program". In many ways we try to do this already by hacking together git repos with everything stored in there as text and then require very particular versions of programs to run everything in there anyways.

I think it's all sufficiently powerful already to build awesome things, but I do not doubt that in the next 10 years something will be built that realizes the ideas which have been kicked around since Smalltalk/Self and raises the bar of productivity.



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