I love the passion behind this project, but as with most physical or high-level UIs, the idea strikes me as overly hubristic. In my experience, truly marvelous works of interaction which expand the range of human thinking require thousands (upon thousands) of lines of code. Clearly, that kind of logic can't fit on scattered, small bits of paper. So is most of that complexity defined by whatever code keeps this thing running? (Realtalk?) Does this mean that the limits of your thinking in this environment are constrained by the skill and intent of the coders developing the system libraries? I feel this will end up becoming little more than a (really cool) room-sized toy, not something that will change the way we think and interact.
Maybe boring ASCII code is simply the correct, inescapable tool for the job. Maybe expanding the range of human thinking is impossible inside a system that can't modify itself.
(But maybe I'm completely wrong!)
EDIT: One of the other comments mentioned that Realtalk is self-hosted on pieces of paper. Hmm, that makes this a whole lot more interesting!
Don't forget that programming languages get more abstract and hence more powerful with fewer lines of code. RealTalk has functions you can call to get the physical location of a piece of paper and being based on Lua makes it much more expressive than C++.
You can keep digging down levels of abstraction but the interesting parts of this system are extremely accessible.
I mean, you could argue that just as with writing, code is emergent from our biology. Brains are naturally wired for language and symbolic thought. Once computation was defined and made technically possible, perhaps the current form of programming was simply inevitable. Not that other things aren't worth trying, of course.
Maybe boring ASCII code is simply the correct, inescapable tool for the job. Maybe expanding the range of human thinking is impossible inside a system that can't modify itself.
(But maybe I'm completely wrong!)
EDIT: One of the other comments mentioned that Realtalk is self-hosted on pieces of paper. Hmm, that makes this a whole lot more interesting!