This is yet another exhortation to "visual" programming.
Ironically, the author seems to believe that programming language syntax can done away with since the textual representation of a programming language is just an incidental detail, yet he simultaneously believes that the syntax is so central to what makes a programming language that by getting rid of it you'll be left with something conceptually independent from the features in any particular language.
I'll just quote a couple paragraphs from the article to illustrate how confused it is:
> In a program written in this way, using garbage collection is just a matter of plugging the right run time support, which you could get along with the system or you could buy from a third party. Instead, we erroneously consider garbage collection as a fundamental attribute of the language in use. As another example, in a language agnostic system we would would be able to create and call closures by just adding a simple module to the system, not by devising yet another language that supports closures as a first class citizen.
> But the advantages don’t stop there. Without the need for a language, it also disappears the need for a compiler. Everything is such a system is already parsed and ready to use. When we combine pieces of code they already know how to glue themselves to each other, so there is no need for a linker either.
Ironically, the author seems to believe that programming language syntax can done away with since the textual representation of a programming language is just an incidental detail, yet he simultaneously believes that the syntax is so central to what makes a programming language that by getting rid of it you'll be left with something conceptually independent from the features in any particular language.
I'll just quote a couple paragraphs from the article to illustrate how confused it is:
> In a program written in this way, using garbage collection is just a matter of plugging the right run time support, which you could get along with the system or you could buy from a third party. Instead, we erroneously consider garbage collection as a fundamental attribute of the language in use. As another example, in a language agnostic system we would would be able to create and call closures by just adding a simple module to the system, not by devising yet another language that supports closures as a first class citizen.
> But the advantages don’t stop there. Without the need for a language, it also disappears the need for a compiler. Everything is such a system is already parsed and ready to use. When we combine pieces of code they already know how to glue themselves to each other, so there is no need for a linker either.