Lambda the Ultimate

Based on Engelbart's famous "mother of all demos" in 1968 that showed off multiple input and output technologies, what could a MOD for PL look like today? Did we already see one with Bret Victor's work, or do we need something more?

Ignorant question: Might anybody be able to succinctly say where we are vis-a-vie effects-continuations-monads? Do we have languages where we can have fun managing effects? Did we give up on the monadic approaches to this? I am too completely out of my depth / behind the times in terms of this research. As a Joe Programmer in the Street, I just want it now and in a usable fashion :-)

E.g. many years back, Filinksi's thesis seemed to talk about a nice way to get all this via monads in standard ML.

Many computational effects, such as exceptions, state, or nondeterminism, can be conveniently specified in terms of monads. We investigate a technique for uniformly adding arbitrary such effects to ML-like languages, without requiring any structural changes to the programs themselves.

Did that turn out to not have good usability or something? I have been trying to skim things related / citing that stuff, but it is all over my head at this point. And I don't yet see if/how/when any such things are reified in a language I can use.

thank you.

Our programming tools should be more democratic, egalitarian, said (Dr.? Mr.? I was assuming Dr.) Edwards a while back. (I, a peon, have great respect for and mostly agree with him, of course, utterly seriously.)

What I see happen in the real world is something like: (1) hack something up to get it working asap; (2) oh no we got actual customers [remember the famous quote about not being able to change Makefile syntax?] we'd better keep on truckin' with this since they want new features and are already bought in to how it works today; (3) who the hell wrote this crap, I can't possibly maintain it! [remember the famous death of Netscape?]

So if we hand people Visual Basic, they might make something great that would never have existed before. BUT what kind of rats nest of hell code will they produce, and what zillions of crazy bugs will they have, and and and.

If that is a real problem somewhere in the world sometimes, how best to address it? Rewrite it? Outsource/offshore rewriting it? Sell it to CA, Inc.?

Or something else? What could we have in our programming languages and ecosystems that would let the masses have their cake and eat it, too?