4. Ink comments in source code. Doesn't it make sense for ink comments to be embeddable in source code? 5. New programming models. Over the years people have tried various visual programming methodologies, but nothing sticks. Programming may just be a hard problem in general to solve... via [Incremental Blogger]
I'm +1 on ink comments; maybe the new managed VSIP stuff lays the ground for that.
As for visual programming, I've been pondering S-Expressions lately. Consider the equivalence of int Foo(int A, int B, int C, int D){ return (A - B) + (C * D); }, the LISP (+ (- A B) (* C D)), and the visual:
And then that could be "collapsed" into a representation something like:
With, of course, the lollipops representing inputs on the bottom, outputs on the top. You could use reflection to generate such a MethodPanel for any .NET object / method call. It's definitely a do-able project. If only I got paid to develop ink software...