When people ask me what the downside of something like
is, I clumsily try to explain that it has no 'reflection', you can't 'manipulate' the rules, move them around, or get them to work together with other programs (other non-CellPond programs, or even other CellPond programs). To improve on CellPond, you'd want to make it more of a 'hybrid' with other stuff.
It's not exactly the same, but I think this paper's concept of 'composability' touches on some of that!
I think that combining live+rich editors together often has the 'lego brick problem'. Combining them together often feels like attaching lego bricks. As in - there are predefined places (studs) where you can place them. You're quite restricted with what can go where. It feels plastic, and hard. I use
Davinci Resolve's Fusion quite a lot, and it certainly feels like that to me (see attached image).
Textual code doesn't feel plastic. It feels like 'playdough'. You can mold different parts together, so that they become interlaced. There's a lot more freedom. I think a great example for this is
JSX. You can compose HTML and Javascript together in any sort of way you want. It doesn't feel restricted, and you aren't stuck with the hard plastic borders caused by keeping them in different files.
That being said, the 'plastic-ness' of live editors is often a feature. eg:
Scratch feels restrictive because it wants to stop you from making mistakes. This is great! But how can we do that while maintain some more 'playdoughyness'?
I've spoken a bit with
Elliot Evans about this, as I think that his
tackle this problem really well!! (for
Polytope)
I'm also interested in
Hest because of its focus on 'continuous-ness' of data. Sounds less rigid to me.
And I'm currently working on a weird thing called Arroost, which aims to be more reflective and intra-composable. Its output is 'more of itself', so it allows a bit more of that. I wouldn't say it's composable, but it's an experimental step towards it.
Anyway, really useful paper! It's given me more of the language and context for exploring this sort of thing!