I did my senior thesis/project in CS (we had to do several, it was anticlimactic) about visual programming, and basic paradigms that might be the future.
I ended up writing a missive about labview holding people back, because 2D planes suck at communicating information to people who otherwise read books and blogs and C# code.
My conclusion 15 years later is that we’ll talk to LLMs and their successors rather than invent a great graphical user interface that works like a desktop or a <table> or even a repl.
Star Trek may have inspired the ipad and terrible polygon capacitive touchscreens… but we all know that “Computer, search for M-class planets without fans of Nickelback’s second album living there as of stardate 2024” is already basically a reality.
EDIT: I like this CPU experiment too! It is a great example of the thing I’m talking about. Realized after the fact that I failed to plant my context in my comment, before doing my graybeard routine.
So. Food for thought, our LLM overlords are just unfathomable spreadsheets.