Steps Toward The Reinvention of Programming is Alan Kay et.al.'s NSF proposal for a system that would, if they can bring it off, could be a revolution in computing. Especially interesting to me is taking introspection to the point where the whole system is comprehensible to (at least) the average programmer – it reminds me of the Lion's annotated Unix source code books, somehow. (I really haven't done the paper justice; please look it over yourself.)
Also worth a look is CIO's interview with Alan Kay where he talks about some of the same ideas found in the Reinvention of Programming paper.
