Mark, thanks for the link to Tinderbox, I put that into the original post.

I think Nelson is not so much thinking about the meta level, though, as emphasizing the value of tools that let people make the machine do what they want. Reconstructible interfaces and behavior have always held a special place in Nelson’s vision of personal computing. It is, at heart, a populist vision: “you can (and must) understand computers NOW!”. This is one of the things I’ve been trying to tease out in my call for artisanal software in “NeoVictorian Computing”, though in my more modest vision a lot of the work still gets done by specialists; Nelson, seldom completely happy with the tools we have been given, insists that we can and should craft our own.

For my own cross-platform interests, I’ve moved on to BlitzBasic, which also uses a BASIC syntax but offers much more useful and direct screen-drawing options, as well as optional RAD-style forms interfaciness.

Now that I got this out of the way, maybe I can press you on your impression that this is a “fair answer.” The devil’s advocate might suggest that unless Nelson can cite concrete, specific examples of expressive computation, ones that cash out the promise of Computer Lib/Dream Machines, that the question remains hypothetical, or worse, the concerns of HCI alone. I wasn’t there, but I have long tried to find inspiration in Nelson’s work alone, rather than his framing of it in talks and lectures.