Right. Personally I've had plenty of experience with certain examples of "declarative programming" and "direct manipulation of data" programming and other than a few fairly niche use cases they are typically horrid for general purpose programming. Think about how "direct manipulation" programming fits into a source control / branching workflow, for example. Unless there's a text intermediary that is extremely human friendly you have a nightmare on your hands. And if there is such an intermediary then you're almost always better off just "directly manipulating" that.
Think about how "direct manipulation" programming fits into a source control / branching workflow, for example.
Trivially. Since virtually all currently used languages form syntactic trees (the exception being such beasts as Forth, Postscript etc.), you could use persistent data structures (which are trees again) for programs in these languages. Serializing the persistent data structure in a log-like fashion would be equivalent to working with a Git repository, only on a more fine-grained level. Essentially, this would also unify the notion of in-editor undo/redo and commit-based versioning; there would be no difference between the two at all. You'd simply tag the whole thing every now and then whenever you reach a development milestone.
