alt Hacker NewsYeah I'm not talking about that. I'm thinking more like "a C program is just a parse tree, so why couldn't a visual tool help you visualize or rearrange the parse tree?"
This academic paper assumes two largely unmixed disciplines just barely kissing each other. I see a complete blending coming that will melt the boundaries between textual and visual programming.
Once you start thinking like this, you stop seeing semantic editing as a feature of a particular language: it should just be a native ability to have on any parseable code: the ability to reassemble the parse tree nodes like lego bricks.
I entirely agree with you, and I'll raise you one -- coding via AST's lets you formally note and track the boundary/linking facts and concepts via comments. That might finally get us out of the stone-age!