This is a proactive post for (and if) there is a Verse Interface, but one of the things that I really liked in Project Spark’s brain editor was that visual elements helped explain complex and technical terminology.
For example, an “array” as a word is hard to understand if you are a non-coder, but having a jar of apples as the icon for an array was the perfect “tell” in Project Spark that this is a variable type that can contain objects (and an object in Project Spark was a variable type that contained multiple parameters, like color, attachments, jump height, etc.)
Also in the example below, there are a couple of great implementations of coding, like the definition of “it” meaning the object which is the question of the query on the parent line, or number variables defined as a blue Hash icon, when number references is a red Hash icon.
This helps the user spots elements way faster than having to look up words. Colors and icons are way faster to track with the eye. Of course, if complexity rises, a search bar is the solution, but this requires the user to know the definition of each icon and it gets more complex when technical terms are used.
So a good solution is to have alternative definitions too, which in this case I d even go as far as to say that “array” should also show up when “jar” is searched, simply for the user that doesn’t know how to find the array when searching. Prob all programmers will send demons my way for saying this, but I don’t believe a user should know all the technical terms for things, as long as they can get the functionality they want that should be enough to “draw” them into the scene rather than overwhelm them with terminology and syntax without a visible, quick result.