I dont think it needs to be a real machine in the sense of a physical one, just in the sense of an execution environment. What worries me about Bret's tools is

I dont think it needs to be a real machine in the sense of a physical one, just in the sense of an execution environment. What worries me about Bret's tools is that it looks like they make it easier for someone to produce something without knowing why. When you learn maths at school, you're normally taught to show your working - getting the answer isn't enough, you need to understand the process. Having so many sliders and timelines to pull around is fine, but at the end of the day we need to teach people functions and variables and recursion and combinators and so forth, and I'm not sure how one does that in this system. In a sense, it is skipping the architecture stage - working not just how to build, but what to build in the first place.