Ever since I saw the cover of Elements of ML Programming [1], which shows the book as charting a course across "Logos Island", I've wondered what a programming

Ever since I saw the cover of Elements of ML Programming [1], which shows the book as charting a course across "Logos Island", I've wondered what a programming language might look like as a navigable space. Perhaps something like walking through a syntax diagram, but that hardly captures it, especially when so much of the semantics of a language is in its standard libraries. Would a program be a path through the language world? Would we think of the world as containing all possible user-defined functions, and we'd edit our way across this space? For a historical metaphorical discussion of visualizing programming, I enjoy this bit from Johan Georg Raeder's 1984 thesis "Programming in Pictures" pp79-80 [2]: "What real-world metaphors can fit programming? To get a feeling for how immense our initial search space is, let us amuse ourselves with a few possibilities. Is a program like a road with intersections and forks where we have to make decisions depending on our current errand, and with roadside inns where we can spend computation time or, if we are careless, completely overflow our stack? Or shall we abolish the 'meta-view' and, instead of seeing the program from the sky, put the programmer inside the program by presenting a view of a tunnel he/she can drive through? At each intersection one might have to throw dice or make guesses to introduce some of the challenge, fantasy and curiosity found in computer games. Perhaps we should rather present programs as physical, three-dimensional objects that we can turn around and view from different angles and in different light so as to reveal the various facets of their structure. Can we present a program as a play with actors and objects on a stage?" See also Raeder's "Survey of Current Graphical Programming Techniques" (1985) [1] https://archive.org/details/elementsofmlprog0000ullm https://archive.org/details/elementsofmlprog0000ullm [2] https://archive.org/details/RaederProgrammingInPictures/page/n88/mode/1up https://archive.org/details/RaederProgrammingInPictures/page...