Function descriptor

I had a thought: if I set up a "knowledge base" as an equivalent of a library, so that each function would have some kind of high-level semantic description of what it does, you'd expect to be able to reason about that to assemble a program from a description of what you want done.

It's still a pretty squishy idea, but ... it sounds right. You could even attach some kind of templated version of how to carry out the computation in question, and then write plain Perl or something on that basis.