Alternatively a psychadelic reaction in the brain combined with something like Oxytocin's claimed properties for enhancing trust. Then the person that shows up convinces the person in contact with the paper that what they're told is true. Many possibilities.
" Could you see applications for e.g. sitting down with a non-technical person and having them construct working software?"
What I see is it's like a combination of old CASE tools, a bit of functional programming, logical composition (see LCF provers), and a pile of dishonest marketing (aka "overselling"). I'm currently in a discussion about it elsewhere given Dijkstra personally nuked it while others found problems. Email me if you want and I'll give you a summary of some of that along with controversies that aren't settled yet.
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Oh hey awesome! Could you see applications for e.g. sitting down with a non-technical person and having them construct working software? That was something that really interested me: the claim that non-programmers could use it.
What you say about how it reminded you of LISP is just fascinating. When I had refined my attempt to implement some HOS-like thing I eventually came up with something that I recognized (later, when I had learned LISP) as a crude subset of that.
Imagine a system that uses a stack, like Forth, but the words/functions are built out of the three primitives (Sequence, Branch, Loop) in, uh, "HOS-style". Give it S-expr syntax and squint and I see a crude proto-LISP. ;-D