[nogridbag]

I've sometimes thought perhaps coding would be much simpler if instead of creating a new programming language, we instead create a fantasy workstation akin to PICO-8/Picotron geared towards building business applications.

On the user interface side, you only have to code to the fantasy workstation's fixed UI and it can be smart enough to automatically be responsive for different screen sizes. Since it's geared towards business apps that are primarily forms, it doesn't have to care about all the edge cases of the web's presentation layer.

Concepts like durable messages queues (like Temporal.io) could be first class citizens so instead of the distributed mess of lambdas, queues, step functions, etc, you just have basic code that can be web scale.

I haven't given it too much thought. It just seemed like something interesting to explore.

[vintermann]

There have many attempts to do something like this. I'm arguably working in one of them now, a so-called low code environment. Much of it amounts to storing functions in a database instead of in a file tree, and losing access to modern conveniences like a language server and revision control. The latter quite a bit like working in the PICO-8 editor, really.