Caterpillar

Writing yesterday's thought on how having a code database affects changes to syntax, I had a realization. Not a completely new one, but some puzzle pieces that I had been thinking about separately suddenly snapped together in my mind: If code shown to the developer is just a rendering of an underlying representation, we're basically halfway to visual programming.

Now, visual programming as it's commonly understood, combining graphical boxes that represent pieces of code, is something I'm very skeptical of. I've never used an implementation that I actually liked. Then again, my exposure to it has been very limited, and was basically non-existent in the last decade or so.

I guess that's a gap in my education that I should try and fill. But either way, I think it's reasonable to imagine a middle ground. Code as text, yes, but maybe formatting it with more than just whitespace. Maybe do draw a box around something here or there, to show the relationships between those words in the code a bit better.