Programmers are too myopic about programming. It always looks the same - long strings of text. And that's the only domain in which we can think. Any (developer)

Programmers are too myopic about programming. It always looks the same - long strings of text. And that's the only domain in which we can think. Any (developer) usability problem is always seen as a language problem. Well, creativity is constraint. What we're actually doing with all of this language is exploring a space of constraints on the Turing machine. But I would argue it's actually a small sub-space of the full thing. For example, you could fix (modern) browser JavaScript and explore what you can do with that. And this is, in fact, what "frameworks" actually do! And a framework does this by providing a higher-order data-structure that the programmer "fills in" with tiny bits of programming language. Meanwhile, this higher-order data-structure is informed by the lower-level constraints of the language, both in form (syntax) and function (paradigm). So basically this is a huge space, but it feels like parts of it are falling into place. Emphasising pure functions, immutable, serializable data-structures, certainly makes filling in those lines of code much more pleasant! So, Elm and Redux in particular have staked out an excellent spot in this space, in my humble opinion. But the problem of developer usability is much bigger than language!