[vertex-four]

One of the more interesting things that I've seen in Dynamicland is that it allows you to create programs that modify other programs - basically the beginnings of a physical IDE. You can use a scrubber or dial to modify a constant, as a very basic first step.

IMHO, the ability to create new physical interfaces to editing code might allow for new programming paradigms to pop up, or better interfaces for people to develop logic in their own domain. Someone could combine a calculator interface and a context-sensitive variable selection interface to write arithmetic logic using an interface/"syntax" that they already understand, and debug all the way through that with a testbed program that allows the programmer to set variables to specific values and work through how the math works. You can have yet another program which describes a program as a flowchart and allows people to edit it that way.

The thing is, as you make the IDE physical, you get to invite people to interact with it more - rather than staring at a screen, suddenly you're livecoding, you can have multiple people working on it at once. "Ah, but doesn't that fail if you do this? Sets some variables on the testbed", or "I can fix the UI while you update that calculation".

And then, when your accountant has something on a piece of paper that works, they could point a "make this an app on my computer" program at it and bring it out of Dynamicland, into their workplace.