[dwallin]

I've always been interested in what programming might look like if it evolved from a non-linguistic base. We tend to assume that having programming using a text-representation is the obvious move but what if a different set of historical/technological priors had led us to build programming abstractions upon something completely different?

[qsort]

Programming languages are abstract syntax trees, not text. They are rendered as text because text is by far the most convenient way to edit, store and cross-reference information.

I don't think there exists any timeline where we don't end up with something we would recognizably call a programming language.