[dang]

> on-screen text that can serve as an entry point or continuation to perform all sorts of computations, things you'd normally write hacky scripts for.

The Acme editor famously works this way. So, in a rudimentary way, does the Emacs scratch buffer. It's a weird amalgam of text editor and REPL: you evaluate snippets of text and get the output in-place, and then edit the text to get what you want next. This live-text-as-code way of working is not how I'm used to interacting with a programming system and always slightly rewires my brain. But even in that simple form, you can grasp in it the beginnings of a whole computational paradigm, all the way up to UI. (Computational models don't usually imply a UI—this is an exception, as are spreadsheets.) Oberon must be the most systematic realization of this. I'd like to try it.

[vezzy-fnord]

Which is unsurprising, because Rob Pike was openly influenced by Oberon in the design of both Acme and the original Plan 9 windowing system 8½ and its current successor rio.

Oberon exploits it further, though. Plan 9 does use chording, programmable text and plumbing but only insofar as it complements the synthetic file system interface, whereas Oberon is more thoroughly object-oriented and can have the text serve as a pointer to various OS subsystems, creating a sort of graphical continuation-passing style, as I alluded.

[aggyger]

The acme editor was new to me so thanks for that. The comment about spreadsheets reminded me of an interview on the Thoughtbot Podcast with Chris Granger about a new IDE being developed called Eve. [podcast link](http://giantrobots.fm/111) If I understand correctly, the idea is that its like excel, but you use it to build domain editors, but it revolves heavily around constraint solvers? I don't know, but the podcast episode is awesome. Bottom line is that I'm giddy to use it [link to the announcement post](http://www.chris-granger.com/2014/10/01/beyond-light-table/)

[skybrian]

Perhaps something like an ipython notebook would be the "modern" way to do it?

[antimagic]

Or getting more modern, Swift playgrounds in the latest versions of XCode have a similar kind of feel to them.