I enjoyed watching the demo and reading the post. I hope you continue to think about this and innovate.
Something that I feel like is missing is the abstraction quality of programming. That is, the idea that I typically have very little use for a particular graphic when writing a program. I'm trying to express "whenever the user hits this button, flip over the top card in this set, move it over here, and then make the next card the top card" or whatever.
Some of Bret's demos look to me like he's thinking directly about this, and trying to discover where the abstraction fits in, and how direct manipulation can help to basically "see" that the abstraction is working. Perhaps that's a good guide to where direct manipulation could really help -- for anything relative complex, it's a big pain to see that code works. A direct manipulation system to basically flip through possibilities, especially into edge cases, and make sure they work as intended would definitely help out. I don't know whether that's the final way you want to express the system -- language is really powerful, even a million years later! -- but a way to see what the language does would be really awesome.
Something that I feel like is missing is the abstraction quality of programming. That is, the idea that I typically have very little use for a particular graphic when writing a program. I'm trying to express "whenever the user hits this button, flip over the top card in this set, move it over here, and then make the next card the top card" or whatever.
Some of Bret's demos look to me like he's thinking directly about this, and trying to discover where the abstraction fits in, and how direct manipulation can help to basically "see" that the abstraction is working. Perhaps that's a good guide to where direct manipulation could really help -- for anything relative complex, it's a big pain to see that code works. A direct manipulation system to basically flip through possibilities, especially into edge cases, and make sure they work as intended would definitely help out. I don't know whether that's the final way you want to express the system -- language is really powerful, even a million years later! -- but a way to see what the language does would be really awesome.