Alison Page wrote:
The best novel I have read on this subject is 'a deepness in the sky' by Vernon Vinge.
Minor nitpick: that's Vernor Vinge. Good book, though I liked _A Fire Upon the Deep_ better.
I think you can fix up a possible future where welding bits and bobs together (or using screwdrivers) could be a realistic programming activity (this isn't in the vinge book, I'm making it up). Whole blocks of code could exist as physical black box systems which you literally bolt together to create programs.
I *love* this idea! It makes so much sense it's kind of frightening. :) The only problem I can see is that, for someone coming from a background where that's how things are done, programming something totally alien, like Zen, would seem next to impossible. Even if Alta technology worked the same way, you'd think they'd have a completely different set of black-box components. Avon probably wouldn't even know where to start.
Then again, maybe's he's an even bigger genius than we're giving him credit for...