There are a number of characteristics of modern programming that I'd like to challange, if not actualy break, in my quest for a new way to make computers do what I want.
The first is our use of ASCII. It's scary to all of us to imagine having to type characters that aren't stenciled on our keys, but we in fact do this every day. All of us have commands on our keyboards that we had to memorize. And we are fine with it. We'd also be fine adding a few more unicode characters into the mix. Though, it would certainly be best if we could all agree on what keystrokes they end up being. APL and Agda have it right.
The second is our adherence to text code in source files. I would like us to break apart the storage of the code, from the editing, and visualization of it. In fact, maybe what we need is to store the code in a relational database. I think Eve has it right.