| My wife chimes in here and says, "don't even talk to me about LabVIEW". She's apparently not happy with it right now, haha. I don't see what you mean about Magma. This is what I've found for Magma: http://www.math.harvard.edu/computing/magma/. It looks like Pascal with Python list comprehensions and sets as a first-class type. Source code in most languages is a one-dimensional construct. Every source file in the project could be concatenated, the newline characters removed, and it would still compile to the same program (assuming the right ordering, barring white-space significant languages, etc.). Is that because we are linear? Is that because our computers are linear? I don't think we're ever going to get away from written language as the abstraction of source code. Most (all?) people think in words. But how that language is presented might change. Literal lines and connectors between code elements has sucked in 2D because it just gets too dense for 2D space. Is that because linear things "want" to stay linear? Or is it because we have had to deal with 2D interfaces and it's easier to work in N-1 dimensions when using an N-dimensional interface? And while I think I've seen attempts at this in 3D, then we have the other issue of 3D interfaces being terrible on 2D IO devices. Never have the two been put together. But I think that's going to change very soon. A lot more people are experimenting with this sort of stuff these days. Good-enough stereo displays are accessible to everyone (slap your phone in the cardboard box you ordered a set of $5 lenses in). Language design is more accessible to everyone. Editor development is, too (I couldn't imagine doing this project 5 years ago, and even 3 years ago it would have been a very poor experience). There is just a culmination of different technologies that make it possible for just about anyone to hack on all of this stuff. Somehow, there seems to be a lot of discouragement lately to do so, but that's a different story entirely. I'll just leave it at saying, I hate the phrase, "don't reinvent the wheel". |
I still think that a graphical language for this is worth exploring, because it already happens to be the way domain experts think, which is presumably why most of the successful commercial software is targeted at them. See for example: http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/networks/ for an overview of how all those things tie together.
Regarding Magma here is a PDF, which contains a summary of the theoretical foundations:
http://sage.math.washington.edu/people/cannon/magma-the-lang...
Essentially it is a language that can do type checked symbolic reasoning, whereas for example Mathematica is for the most part untyped. Page 11 explains the steps necessary to extend the system (you have to write a C-library, so that is less then ideal). The reason I bring this up is because relations between symbolic expressions (for example equations) are really something that lives in a higher dimensional space, see for example the Associahedron (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Associahedron). In a 2-dimensional language ordinary programs would be graphs and metaprogramming would be surfaces between graphs. As long as you have only a 2 dimensional surface available, that kind representation probably would not work, but I believe as a conceptual idea it is rather helpful.
I agree with you, that the moment convenient augmented reality hits, we will hopefully see different variations of program representations emerge. Especially complicated concurrent systems would probably benefit from it, since they don't have a sequential control flow.