Implications for future systems

The graphical display of program information now has to be considered a top priority for the further development of programming environments. It seems to be an area where a relatively small amount of development can result in significant gains in programmer efficiency.

An important design goal that seems to be ignored by many experimental systems is that of flexibility. The great advantage of the traditional Unix environment is that it can easily be tailored to unusual requirements. If new systems are going to compete with current programs then they must be equally flexible. My own system makes some progress in that area by allowing the user to impose their own graphical structure on a program when they reposition, group and colour-code icons. This comes at the cost of adding an extra logical construct to the existing programming language, but not a complicated one, and one that compares favourably with file and directory structures, which it could conceivable replace.