Reflections on Innovation in a New Programming Language

It is not particularly hard to develop your own CPL (computer programming language), but what could make it more than "YAPL"— Yet Another Programming Language? What could make the effort truly worth it?  The answer to that depends upon how you evaluate “worth it”— For example, you are likely to learn nuances and things that may be valuable to you personally, making you a better programmer in the process. Is that alone worth it? It seems unlikely to be worth it in the sense of providing the world with a new tool that is highly productive compared with existing CPL's, especially if one uses the same well-documented tools and techniques that were used for languages that came before yours— text-based lexing and parsing and code generation and so forth seem highly UN-likely to produce anything beyond YAPL.

HOWEVER, there is a real and crying need for some new breakthrough in the technology of programming computers, although creating YAPL won't get us there.

Human beings are visually-driven creatures, and programming (in any language, including anyone's YAPL) is a textually-driven thing. OTOH, “visual” languages, seem not to have made any real breakthroughs of the type I am looking for, either. There are some new "visual" coding ideas and explorations from the 20-teens that I have not kept up with, that might justify more a of a deep dive, however.

I think we need a “Gregg Shorthand” not for code itself, but rather for the things that code does: iteration, alternation (if-then-else), assignment, selection, data flow, data definition, data access, memory manipulation, input, output, and so forth. There are some AI-based coding aids, e.g.

Bubble https://bubble.io/

... which bills itself as "The full-stack, no-code app builder for everyone", although it seems to me to be heavy and not as "visual" as one might hope.

We need a way to control and to specify and to store programming context, so that the computer itself can “complete the details” from context metadata that is already somehow standardized, stored, and available. The program gets created in detail based on programmer “hints and gestures” only. This sort of “breakthrough” would be (I believe) much, much different than simply developing one's own "better" programming language.

OTOH, I am "too patterned" as an already expert journeyman coder to break through to that new "Gregg Shorthand" technique that I fumblingly describe. I invite others to consider this and make their own efforts, (and share such efforts online-- see you on

medium dot-com or code project dot-com or place of your choice, but please let me know!