Ah, what a delightful rabbit hole your comment led me down.. I've got about twenty tabs open now, articles on the history of (and the relationships between) pro

Ah, what a delightful rabbit hole your comment led me down.. I've got about twenty tabs open now, articles on the history of (and the relationships between) programming languages and graphical user interfaces. Will enjoy this food for thought! My recent reading has included: Unix: A History and a Memoir (Brian Kernighan) - https://www.cs.princeton.edu/~bwk/memoir.html https://www.cs.princeton.edu/~bwk/memoir.html The Development of the C Language (Dennis Ritchie) - https://www.bell-labs.com/usr/dmr/www/chist.html https://www.bell-labs.com/usr/dmr/www/chist.html JavaScript: The First 20 Years (Brendan Eich) - https://zenodo.org/record/3710954/files/jshopl-preprint-2020-03-13.pdf https://zenodo.org/record/3710954/files/jshopl-preprint-2020... (PDF) This morning, this little phrase jumped out: > C was created on a tiny machine as a tool to improve a meager programming environment. What this made me realize is that a language is a user interface. It makes sense how C evolved with UNIX as an operating system, that a language is deeply fundamental to a computing environment (and its development). There's a parallel with JavaScript and Netscape. The language was meant to provide users with an interface to operate the web browser, create dynamic documents, and (as it turned out) to let users develop the web environment. ..Which brings me back to the Cedar/Tioga programming environment you mentioned. While searching around, I happened across another comment of yours (I see it's a favorite topic! :) and found the good stuff: Eric Bier Demonstrates Cedar - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z_dt7NG38V4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z_dt7NG38V4 (video) Active Tioga documents: an exploration of two paradigms - http://cajun.cs.nott.ac.uk/wiley/journals/epobetan/pdf/volume3/issue2/ep030dt.pdf http://cajun.cs.nott.ac.uk/wiley/journals/epobetan/pdf/volum... (PDF) The Mesa Programming Environment - http://www.digibarn.com/collections/papers/dick-sweet/xdepaper.pdf http://www.digibarn.com/collections/papers/dick-sweet/xdepap... (PDF) Fascinating. I saw a phrase, "active document applications", which interestingly is what the web has become, in its own monstrous way. It's a good point about "re-introducing" old ideas. I was lucky to have grown up in the earlier days of computers, to have breathed (a little) of its different culture and worldview, that I've learned to appreciate its history and the wealth of ideas - what made possible our current networked computing environment, and visions yet to be fully realized.