From a 1995 paper on intentional programming: “Present day syntax had [sic] been predicated on a character stream that could have been input from punch cards, or teletypes.” Exactly! Why are we still working in a punch-card manner on million-pixel displays? Why are we still arguing about curly brackets versus parentheses when Unicode has millions of characters? In short, why do we have syntax at all?
Abandoning syntax wouldn’t mean abandoning “real” programming. Visual programming probably didn’t catch on because designing software with a mouse was too slow. But that’s a fault of the interface, not the method. There’s no reason why an tree-like editor in an Intentional Programming system couldn’t be as slick as Emacs with Paredit. Assuming the editor were also developed with Intentional Programming, it would be just as extendable as Emacs.
From the same paper: “Meta-work (i.e. consistent rewriting of a program) is not expressible in languages even though it comprises a substantial part of programmer’s workload. Lisp is an exception in this regard, but only at the cost of failing most other tests for usability.” I might argue with the usability statement, but the rest is true.
Sadly, Intentional Programming was originally developed at Microsoft, patented, and then seemingly abandoned. On the upside, the author of that paper now has his own company, Intentional Software, with patent deals with Microsoft and a blog.