(OP here) I don't think plain-text source code will ever be replaced as the main way of writing programs.
It is simple, transparent, has accumulated very large number of tools for analyzing and editing it (think of all the UNIX utilities or the complexity of IDEs).
However most of the non-plain-text methods (like UML) help you get a bird-eye view of what you are creating.
Also Humble can be embedded in rich text (like HTML) so it may have some niche uses as a real programming language.
I have built a prototype blog that you could re-program with Humble via WYSIWYG editing some time ago. It was brittle (you could break the website by errors in the main template) and slow, but it was fun to do everything in the browser.
Creating a programming system where the primary representation of a program is not text, but rather a dynamic data structure is the core idea behind Intentional Programming (Charles Simonyi's post-Microsoft company).
http://intentsoft.com/technology/overview.html
This is Charles's ultimate "going meta" idea to try to advance programming beyond our 1960's metaphor representing programs as raw text.
It's not been widely adopted, so the company is selling it into markets where you want domain experts to be able to "write code" rather than have them hand off a spec to a programmer. It's kind of a domain specific language (DSL) compiler generator.
Thanks, that's interesting. It is really hard to find these kind of systems in the wild.
I've read a bit about the SCID (source code in database) paradigm, and it seems similar, representing the code as a graph database. But it seems mainly about people talking how great it would be instead of implementing it and putting it to the test :P
It is simple, transparent, has accumulated very large number of tools for analyzing and editing it (think of all the UNIX utilities or the complexity of IDEs).
However most of the non-plain-text methods (like UML) help you get a bird-eye view of what you are creating.
Also Humble can be embedded in rich text (like HTML) so it may have some niche uses as a real programming language.
I have built a prototype blog that you could re-program with Humble via WYSIWYG editing some time ago. It was brittle (you could break the website by errors in the main template) and slow, but it was fun to do everything in the browser.