We have the systems we have now because we used the same medium for thousands of years. To create new expressive mediums that take advantage of computers will t

We have the systems we have now because we used the same medium for thousands of years. To create new expressive mediums that take advantage of computers will take careful design and iteration, just as alphabetic text went through various handscripts like cursive, torturous to read German blackletter http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackletter http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackletter and settled on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_type http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_type Then we went to san serifs (like here on HN) and then to monospaced code fonts. It's a long line and a lot of work by designers. Adding to this medium will also take a lot of work. An essay can be more expressive when various ideas in it are turned into visualizations. Writers of long novels use special writer software to keep track of which characters interact with what others, to create family charts, friend charts, event timelines, etc. These don't replace text, they augment it. And it would be interesting to have a macro view of the book through such tools for readers someday. Not every attempt reduced the expressiveness of code. Syntax highlighting is graphical. Labview is graphical. Short compile cycles so the programmer can see what he's doing is graphical. Great demo of that here https://vimeo.com/36579366 https://vimeo.com/36579366 Just because this particular attempt at pretty lisp leaves much to be desired doesn't mean we should stop attempting. Simple programmer tasks like naming can be improved if we move away from plain text as the medium, more detail here http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3633740 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3633740 and http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3651257 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3651257