Hot or not: subtext programming language
subtextual.org
subtextual.org
I find the GUI editor with a mouse painful and this GUI isn't helping! With a heavily user optimised interface with at the very least some of the smarts of Excel and a lot of hot keys (get rid of the dialogs, stop making me right click to splice etc) then it has some potential.
What I think we need is this approach translated into a real language with real libraries that have side effects and all the lovely mess that is a real programming environment. Right now its hard to see just how bad it is for the other 99% of programming that is grabbing from a DB and throwing data on a screen (those poor corporate drones!).
How about the author hosts his website with the language! Building enough infrastructure to do that is bound to help advance the language to the point where its more than just a toy.
An interesting simple way to consider logic will be interesting to watch this evolve.
... and he also said here: http://alarmingdevelopment.org/?p=177
"I have realized that this is not going to happen inside Computer Science, at least not at first. The idea with Juncture is to build something that might be really useful, and is complete enough to allow other people to extend it."
I have had something similar in mind for a while, but when I saw Subtext, I found that what I had been thinking about program representation (as inspired by git) was very similar to the stuff in Subtext's papers, except that Subtext's was much more developed in the vein of Smalltalk. On the other hand, I found the decision tree stuff to be something of a curiosity; I'm not sure if it's necessary for the Smalltalky functionality.
I think this type of visualization would be fantastic as an eclipse plugin for Java. It would be at a minimum a great teaching tool to new programmers.