As a fairly new (4 years) programmer with an avid interest in comparative language features and tooling, this looks like the direction that every cool new thing I've read about or attempted to create myself seems to be going. The LISPers have always been there, preaching freedom from syntax and a focus on semantics, but it has never made it into a readable form for your average new aspiring programmer.
I keep thinking what we need is for the structure of programs to be something saner than the one-dimensional byte stream that we keep pretending programs aren't by splitting them into lines, functions, classes, and files. Tables aren't fundamentally different than those other constructs, in the same sense that programming languages aren't fundamentally different from each other - BF is Turing complete and all that. But usability and learning curve, as someone said on here, really matter, and tables have a far more clean and rigid structure than a mess of braces.
The most difficult problems in programming aren't the low level algorithms, they're the social problems along the lines of how do you involve large numbers of new programmers in a project without ruining it, or how do you empower users to create their own features without starting over and building a custom rules engine?
I keep thinking what we need is for the structure of programs to be something saner than the one-dimensional byte stream that we keep pretending programs aren't by splitting them into lines, functions, classes, and files. Tables aren't fundamentally different than those other constructs, in the same sense that programming languages aren't fundamentally different from each other - BF is Turing complete and all that. But usability and learning curve, as someone said on here, really matter, and tables have a far more clean and rigid structure than a mess of braces.
The most difficult problems in programming aren't the low level algorithms, they're the social problems along the lines of how do you involve large numbers of new programmers in a project without ruining it, or how do you empower users to create their own features without starting over and building a custom rules engine?