The world needs programmers to accept and take seriously Greg Wilson's extensible programming, and stop laughing it off as "lolwut wysiwyg msword for programming", and start implementing it. http://third-bit.com/blog/archives/4302.html
Who is "the world"? For starters, I don't think it is Greg Wilson's idea, and if you look for alternate sources, often under other titles, you'll find parts of it implemented, with varying degrees of success and often little acceptance. The idea is much older than one might think - conferences on extensible languages were held around 1970. Early implementation approximations didn't have the disposable computing power of today's PCs, nor did early implementers find an audience ready for their ideas (to feed their students or themselves, some of those who were such ahead of the curve had to switch to working on more conventional, funded, topics). Useful search keys: - extensible languages (as in AI, the meaning of "extensible" tends to be redefined whenever a problem gets solved, so many features that used to mark an extensible language in the past have now become standard) - structure editors (in that they were forerunners of projectional IDEs, and exhibited some of their advantages and disadvantages; there have been many efforts to generate structure editors from language descriptions) - projectional language workbenches (instead of parsing source to AST, the IDE/workbench operates on an AST-like abstract model, and source code views are just projections of that; makes it easier to embed sublanguages); Smalltalkers will probably claim their image-based IDEs have been doing that all along. - hyper-programming (where persistent runtime data can be embedded in code via linking, similar to hypertext, with generic editors instead of generic Read/Show) - Banana Algebra: Syntactic Language Extension via an Algebra of Languages and Transformations (one example of research on language composition) IDE generators, IDE tooling for domain-specific languages, language-oriented programming, language workbenches, ... they all contribute to the now broader interest in the topic. In the context of Haskell, there once was Keith Hanna's document-centered programming: http://www.cs.kent.ac.uk/projects/vital/ http://www.cs.kent.ac.uk/projects/pivotal/ Perhaps Keith's projects can serve as an inspiration to just start hacking?-) The subject is an instance of these quotes: "The future is already here - it's just not very evenly distributed." William Gibson "The best way to predict the future is to invent it." Alan Kay Claus http://clausreinke.github.com/