My little screencast has now gotten over ten thousand hits. Amazing. It seems there is a large pent-up desire for a better way to program. I have gotten lots of positive feedback, much of it endorsing not so much the particulars of Subtext as that I am making an attempt to improve things. Thanks to everyone.
I have also triggered some fairly negative reactions. I take this response also as a positive sign, that my work is threatening enough to warrant a backlash. I have written an FAQ to answer some of the recurrent criticisms.
This might be a good time for a progress update on Subtext. I have decided to change direction somewhat. I was previously working on “getting factorial right” with new representations for conditionals, iteration, and higher-order functions, as described in the Future Work section of my OOPSLA submission. I now think I should shelve that and instead face the issue of I/O and mutable state. This nasty problem has been the bane of much programming language research, particularly leaving functional languages tied up in knots. It could be the critical issue that makes or breaks Subtext. My new goal is to show how to build a GUI in Subtext, and to do so while maintaining the principles of WYSIWYG and the unification of edit-time with run-time, just as with factorial. I haven’t figured out all the details yet, but if I can pull it off it would make an eye-opening demo, and also make Subtext dramatically more realistic and relevant.