Honestly I thought by now we would be interacting on a much higher and richer level with the machine Smalltalk took some steps in this direction, and saw a deg

Honestly I thought by now we would be interacting on a much higher and richer level with the machine Smalltalk took some steps in this direction, and saw a degree of commercial use in the 90s. For the matter, fire up a REPL from your favourite LISP and you'll have a more interactive experience than most mainstream languages offer. There are still attempts to move in this direction. "Notebook" interfaces which are kind-of popular with data scientists in some fields. Swift playgrounds. I think what's prevented interactive environments gaining more traction is pretty much the same thing that's driving a lot of the trends in the linked article: what is being optimised is fine-grained collaboration and discipline within teams at the expense of flair and individuality. The modernist developer is getting unit tests to pass, not playing in an interactive interface.