2025-03-09 11:52 • 143 words

Even though the web might still be one of the best shots we've had yet at creating a dynamic medium, it is stupendously complicated to showcase the dynamic behavior of a process or algorithm. You can show a source listing, but stepping through something, suspending execution, inspecting state, let alone modifying code at runtime is hard and needs tons of bespoke manual code/tooling around it (which in itself might then also not even have the property of being modifiable, inspectable etc..). A Smalltalk or Lisp-like environment could help with some of the issues, but likely at the cost of ease of distributability and probably broader understandability. More than sixty years have passed since Douglas Engelbart wanted to augment the human intellect with computers, and metaphorically speaking, we are still writing with pencils that have a brick attached to them.