After I saw the announcement from Apple about their new programming language called Swift and the lovely looking feature called Playground I was immediately remembering an article by Brett Victor that demonstrated similar ideas:
http://worrydream.com/LearnableProgramming/
Some more info has been coming out from Chris Lattner, the head of the Apple tools department, that Playground was heavily influenced by Victor's ideas.
The devil is in the details, but this looks really good and the concepts are exactly what I think we need for robotics.
Heres some info on Apple's Playground.
