This is yet another exhortation to "visual" programming. Ironically, the author seems to believe that programming language syntax can done away with since the

This is yet another exhortation to "visual" programming. Ironically, the author seems to believe that programming language syntax can done away with since the textual representation of a programming language is just an incidental detail, yet he simultaneously believes that the syntax is so central to what makes a programming language that by getting rid of it you'll be left with something conceptually independent from the features in any particular language. I'll just quote a couple paragraphs from the article to illustrate how confused it is: > In a program written in this way, using garbage collection is just a matter of plugging the right run time support, which you could get along with the system or you could buy from a third party. Instead, we erroneously consider garbage collection as a fundamental attribute of the language in use. As another example, in a language agnostic system we would would be able to create and call closures by just adding a simple module to the system, not by devising yet another language that supports closures as a first class citizen. > But the advantages don’t stop there. Without the need for a language, it also disappears the need for a compiler. Everything is such a system is already parsed and ready to use. When we combine pieces of code they already know how to glue themselves to each other, so there is no need for a linker either.