[clarry]

Separate metadata/markup for presentation + code sounds sounds like a straightforward choice, but I'm concerned that it'll incur a lot of maintenance overhead, and the programmer working with the code still needs to keep it up to date and relevant somehow. Dunno, I feel like it'd feel like code + doxygen boilerplate comments (a pain in the butt if you ask me) but worse.

I'm thinking that we need language level support for higher level semantic constructs and relations. Right now code is somewhat analogous to raster graphics or very simple vector graphics. You can construct anything with it, but it is very rigid and there's only so much high level structure that tools can try to infer and dump out of it. (Think call graphs, dependency graphs, flow charts, index of class hierarchies.. all of them somewhat useful for certain purposes, but none of them really good for high level design work or reasoning about systems at a level above the plain code).

We could slap some metadata on vectors or raster images but I think that's a far cry from ideal. I think that, with sufficient support from the language, we can provide most of the visual structure for alternate views by simply graphing with help of the semantics that are laid bare in the code. I wouldn't mind some additional hints for presentation, but if we're adding lots of markup and metadata, I think we're going in the wrong direction.