So, I'm an EUP person at heart, and this ChatGPT thing has obviously got me thinking all over again about what programming would look like to a non-technical person. At heart, I feel it should be like they're "casting spells" over reality (or virtual reality). This tips into the area of cognitive modelling: how close the physical manifestation needs to be to be able to be abstracted up to a satisfying cognitive model that matches the human's intention. In other words, you cast a spell "make that banana green!" and it comes back a lurid dayglo green, that would be a cognitive dissonance because really, you'd expect to simply get a very unripe-looking banana. What are the elements of this formalised spell-casting, this "programming system"? You have objects (banana, this one, not all ones), attributes (green, the correct one!), a sense of time or evolution (went from yellow to green). You start to get into Roget's Thesaurus land: what are the key concepts for describing the world, our human world?
Anyway, just a splat of the stuff buzzing around my head right now. Thoughts?