I think what they are doing at DynamicLand is trying to similar experiments as Douglas Engelbart back in the 60s to try and find ways to bring more of the other innate skills we have into a computer that is not via a keyboard.
So like the mouse, it might seem like a toy but it has the potential to be combined with pure programming.
Also especially with neural networks that are learning how to code, we may be able to give more physical input to a neural network and it will produce the program.
All this is looking far into the future, so they don't know what the final outcome is either, but they're experimenting to find what works.
I’m sure there were people who were against the concept of syntax highlighting when it began for similar reasons but I would hazard a guess that most people who code regularly find it invaluable.
I grant you that this probably won’t be useful for say, kernel programming, but it is also extremely new and an experiment. The worst thing we can do is ossify our ways of thinking and not be open to new and experimental ideas.
Not as many people meet strangers in chat rooms or games these days, but it'd be sad if the baby of connecting people anywhere was thrown out with the bathwater of big social panopticons and glass screen prisons.
I can also see it being useful as a very general _and_ powerful prototyping tool, one of the demos shows someone making an input controller from a physical spring and a colored piece of clay.
When it becomes so easy to integrate your environment with the computer, I can only begin to imagine what's possible.
Is Dynamicland open source?
Dynamicland shares many core values with the open source movement and in some ways goes beyond them.
A primary design principle at Dynamicland is that all running code must be visible, physically printed on paper. Thus whenever a program is running, its source code is right there for anybody to see and modify. Likewise the operating system itself is implemented as pages of code, and members of the community constantly modify and improve it.
That said, the pages of code physically in Dynamicland are not in a git repository. The community organizes code spatially — laying it out on tables and walls, storing it in folders, binders, and bookshelves.
Given that this comes from research directly connected to Alan Kay, he at least is well aware of the values of the people who pushed computers from simple calculating machines to things that we create with.
They also repeatedly refer to the research of Douglas Engelbart and his desire for computers to augment humans. So they are at least trying to bring forward ideas from a time when the core values of the personal computer were being considered.
Almost everything that's good and powerful about software comes precisely because it's non-physical. It's probably just a failure of imagination on my part, but I can't see a path where re-introducing a bunch of physical representations of virtual things makes things better for those trying to create, maintain, or understand complex systems.