Programming breakthroughs we need

It is also the thinking we can see supporting a lot of the early devops movement.

Often the workflow in automating a work process is: - Worker has intuition on how things work - Specialist starts automating and running into exceptions, walls - Worker explains exceptions as they're discovered - Specialist adds spaghetti to the 'clean' business logic model they started with - This keeps going until the end result looks like what the worker expects - The worker then sees a datapoint they think is incorrect, but they can't check it because the business logic is embedded in software, code, database stored procedures, etc. - The specialist is then called back into debug and resolve the issue.

At my workplace we run into this issue constantly, where the ability to modify/adapt the business logic is lost through automation, and it becomes obscured to the point that the intuitive workers can't trust that the logical model is right.

There needs to be better separation of business logic from models so that programmers don't need to 'dig' into business processes and exceptions, and workers don't need to deal with part of their responsibility being shoved into a black box that they're not sure they totally trust or can adapt easily should a need arise.

If "text" (so only the sequence of tokens) was the valuable representation, then we would all program without any formating (no additional spaces and linebreaks).

Now, you might say well formating is important for readability. These spaces and line breaks do matter. But, just adding them randomly where they are syntactically allowed is not helpful either. There is some very specific structure to formating: The AST.

So, in other words we usually structure short snippets of text sequences in a graphical layout by ASCII-arting the structure into it. And, even with that, many people would complain about the missing syntax highlighting, another meta property that pure text does not have ...

Anyway, I think you are right about almost all tooling being build for text, so we are kind of stuck with it ("unchangeable fact of life"). However, that does not mean that it is the ultimate representation.

E.g. there is still one industrial nation stuck using the imperial system, and that is certainly not because it is more practical than the metric system. It is just that the infrastructure, tooling and culture has internalized it.

What's sad to me is that the modern follow-up to Ruby seemingly doesn't exist. Every hot "language du jour" which has come after Ruby has gone BACKWARDS. Lower-level, more systems programming oriented. Maybe even compiled. Static typing everywhere. It's utterly baffling to me.

"Why are you using Ruby? You should use…Rust! (Go! Zig! Fill-in-the-blank nerd hype!)"

Lol.

What I actually want is a new programming language/environment which makes Ruby look like programming pointer arithmetic in C by comparison. Something so advanced, so high level, that much of the time you're really just describing patterns and flows and data models and extensions, and then letting the computer determine the most efficient way to develop those code paths and execute them.

Unfortunately, I'm a bit cynical on this front. I believe the reason this doesn't exist is because it's at cross-purposes with programmer nerd culture. Many programmers enjoy the nitty-gritty of low-level coding. They fear abstraction. They fear "magic". They fear things like "implicit imports" or "duck typing" or "many ways to express the same method/function/algorithm" etc. because it's all nebulous and fuzzy compared to the safe confines of deterministic math & logic. "If I declare that this variable MUST BE AN INTEGER, then it MUST BE AN INTEGER. The idea you could pass me a string instead? UNACCEPTABLE !!!#%@!"

In other words, I don't have high hopes that great UX for forward-looking developers will come from present-day programming culture. For a quantum leap in DX, we probably need people who aren't die-hard programmers to engage in blue sky thinking. We need to talk to artists, philosophers, linguists, psychologists, and other experts in social & historical cultural dynamics. They can provide the insight we lack. Because for every "this is an integer, damnit!" type out there, there are probably many, many more who would see 123 and "123" and think THAT'S THE SAME THING. :-D