| We can't and don't have to give up text. Text is essential for humans and could be a significant part of the interface (both reading and typing). The problem is more about the underlying unit being text. The problematic part of text is when we just write it freely and then have to parse it back and make sense of it which has very severe consequences. This is because in the programming environment world we are forever stuck with a "text editor" mindset. This means we shift the complexity away from the environment and pass it on to the compiler and the programmer which is not a good place for it to be. So you can use "nano" to write very complex programs. Some people consider that a benefit, and in one way it is. However it is also simultaneously very problematic. Because it perfectly demonstrates just how far removed the authoring tool is from the problem domain. The way I see it is that to unlock a new generation of software development experiences there's no way but to accept that we can't forever confine the act of programming to the primitive act of writing text like a book in a text editor. The environment needs to be much more closely connected to the problem domain so that it can further empower you to do stuff. |
I think richer editing, in effect editing the AST, rather than the concrete syntax is interesting.
But I'm not convinced that it's a blocker for making more declarative code. I think macros will get us very very far. The procedural stuff in rust, has me really excited about the future.
The downside of not using text as the underlying unit of truth is that you have to reinvent an IDE, version control, conflict resolution, review tools, etc. That takes a LOT of buy-in.
If you can 90% of syntactic sugar required from macros (and the like), you can work on the actual abstractions / declarations instead of the compiler toolchain.
Just my two cents.