I was thinking the same! I love Prolog, but maybe Verse will turn out to be an actually better, cleaned-up Prolog?
Implementing Verse in Prolog would be so much fun and very natural.
Yes, the syntax is a problem. I'm working on it, but I have not yet found a consistent and ergonomic design of the structure editor that covers the infix notation.
All function parameter usages in function bodies are just "ordinary" links to their corresponding declarations, and it just happens that links are rendered as "-->" followed by the name of the cell pointed to by the link. Instead of the arrow symbol I could render the link with some distinct background pattern or color. I might also make the arrow shorter, I guess.
Here is a short demo of a prototype of a tree-based spreadsheet I'm working on:
https://youtu.be/pphY94boHq4
I intend to make it collaborative at some point, but I'll have to study OT and CRDT first :-)
I agree wholeheartedly with your comment -- no-one is actually saying that programming is fundamentally easy.
I'd go even further and say that textual vs visual is a bit of a false dichotomy. Text is a form of visual notation. We format our source code carefully to achieve specific visual effects. The same AST can be rendered in many different ways of various visual richness. Formatted text is just one point in a continuum of possible visualisations of the same AST.
“Perfection (in design) is achieved not when there is nothing more to add, but rather when there is nothing more to take away.” Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
Your essays are not bad, but there are still parts you can
take away.
Creating a good design is very time consuming. One spends most of the time searching for the onions.