Took a few days to find out what kind of touch-first interface I could come up with that also does away with english altogether. As suggested above, I went with the Horadric crafting box-type interface because it can be explained in 10 seconds and needs no prior programming knowledge:
This is, to me, the most powerful general purpose programming paradigm and it conveniently lends itself well to touch interfaces as it has no keywords.
The interface includes symbols that can be modified, a ruleset and a bag. The whole be explained in very few pages:
Since the paradigm is mostly unknown to most people outside of academia, I also made a little zine:
The zine includes the source for a tiny implementation of multiset-rewriting based on fractions and prime encoding, that anyone can implement in 5 minutes:
long src[] = {2,3,0,0};
long *f = src, acc = 18;
while(f[den])
if(acc % f[den])
f += 2;
else
acc = acc * f[num] / f[den], f = src;
It has been nice to see people make their own, and figure out on their own how to write complex programs. Some people have even made their own physical paper computers for it(it’s like realtalk, only moreso):
One teacher showed their students how to use this and people got it near instantly. One unpredictable effect was that it can be used to tell stories too without anything special extra:
You can try the playground online(3800 bytes), or build it from sources
I hope this gives you a taste of what a minimal and touch-first programming languages can look like 