Reclaiming the Unexplored in Hybrid Visual Programming

Programming languages have been trapped in a world of linear textual representations fundamentally unchanged for half a century. Even systems pushing beyond these forms — visual languages, projectional language workbenches, and end-user programming tools — largely ape the strictures of stream-of-bytes compilers and confine themselves to the popular paradigms of conventional textual systems. Instead of recreating what succeeded in textual paradigms, new programming systems should also be exploring what did not — the confounding, confusing, convoluted approaches that fell by the wayside — with the sorts of direct manipulation, spatial connection, and change over time that textual languages could never match; and they should use their control of presentation to let the user choose the right representation for a piece of code in the moment — and change it. We argue that these two points unlock new frontiers for programming systems, and present preliminary explorations to highlight how multiple-representation environments can lower the pressure on more speculative visual paradigms, to encourage more investigation of this underexamined space.