In this age we need to think about things like voice control and 3D manipulation of data-structures and a dynamic view of the code.
We can truthfully keep designing 2D editors (and we will always most likely use them to some extent) but I believe it is more important to consider different UI paradigms altogether.
For instance, what about editing a living code environment? Game development is very immersive: you can manipulate a running environment and see results immediately. How can this be extended to other development tasks like server-side development?
What if, when you select a for loop from code fragment a 3D visualization of the programs data structures at that point is shown to the user. What if you can, instead of launching a debugger, run the debugger as you're writing the code and step forward and back and see these visualizations change?
We have all the technology. It's time to get to the next level.
We can truthfully keep designing 2D editors (and we will always most likely use them to some extent) but I believe it is more important to consider different UI paradigms altogether.
For instance, what about editing a living code environment? Game development is very immersive: you can manipulate a running environment and see results immediately. How can this be extended to other development tasks like server-side development?
What if, when you select a for loop from code fragment a 3D visualization of the programs data structures at that point is shown to the user. What if you can, instead of launching a debugger, run the debugger as you're writing the code and step forward and back and see these visualizations change?
We have all the technology. It's time to get to the next level.