There's a lot of thinking around those lines, specially since the work of Bret Victor on data-rich programmable environments. Spreadsheet-like IDEs are the mos

There's a lot of thinking around those lines, specially since the work of Bret Victor on data-rich programmable environments. Spreadsheet-like IDEs are the most logical direction to meet that vision, specially when you want to attract non-programmers; figuring out the language syntax and the runtime execution model are the hardest parts of learning to program, and spreadsheets minimize both. I put my bet on code notebooks, of the functional reactive variety. They have the same interaction model of the spreadsheet, intermixing data and code in the same environment, and they allow you to grow a program iteratively with cells acting as reusable objects - a simpler metaphor than OOP, but equally powerful. Data scientists are already making good use of them, and it's easy to think that these notebooks will be getting more and more of the debugging and DevOps functions of traditional IDEs.