Ideas

I'm taking this opportunity to write down some ideas I had during today's talk, so that I don't forget them :)

Non-standard programming interfaces - what could we do if we wrote programs in a WYSIWYG editor? Or an auto cad type editor? Or any domain application? What would that be like? Also, could you bootstrap such a system (ie. implement the non-standard language using a non-standard language)? Intuitively not, but maybe that's why we haven't figured it out yet.

Program diff - diff a program not as a text file, but as a syntatically (and semantically?) correct piece of code.

Program representation - how can we represent a program other than a bunch of lines of text? Does this apply to the previous point?

BRAINSTORM!!!
Gdankin problems!! = design patters. According to Greg's definition (going to double check this against wikipedia in a minute), a Gdankin problem is one that results in the same solution when solved by independent domain experts. Now, as I understand it, when the gang of four first wrote Design Patterns, they analyzed large amounts of code, created by programmers in different organizations, independently of each other, and noticed that certain problems resulted in similar structures in the code. Therefore, I propose that the Design Patterns are the common solutions to a set of fundamental Gdankin problems.