| Well LabVIEW might be not the best example :), but in part that is because it has many quirks that would hopefully be not present in a more general system. Also because most LabVIEW sheets were probably put together by someone that just wanted to get something to work at all and not really cared about the next person that had to deal with the mess... 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. |