> There is ultimately some underlying thing that you want to make changes to, but you often want to be able to make those changes from different viewpoints (or in different contexts) depending on the types of changes you want to make
This is something I thought a lot about and really hope to see more in programming. Everything - every object, every concept, every program - has multiple representations, and in order to understand that thing you need to see it in multiple representations. But code is one representation, static text. Having other representations (like the laid-out website), especially that you can not just view but also edit, makes your project a lot easier to understand.
Recently I started incorporating n8n, a workflow automation software, into my backend. Initially my use-cases were Zapier-like. But I realised it was more powerful as a visual program editor. For certain kinds of workflows, it is more intuitive to code and manipulate them using graphical nodes. Perhaps, we can have a similar text+graphical editor for such backend code as well.
This is something I thought a lot about and really hope to see more in programming. Everything - every object, every concept, every program - has multiple representations, and in order to understand that thing you need to see it in multiple representations. But code is one representation, static text. Having other representations (like the laid-out website), especially that you can not just view but also edit, makes your project a lot easier to understand.