@zens
Not the most radical solution, but have you seen Glamorous Toolkit (built on Pharo, which is a Smalltalk variant)? It's reimagining the Smalltalk computer, and what I find most interesting is that it's exploring ways of making programming more visible, dynamic and exploratory.
I don't know that it's THE solution (and I'd also like to bring back analog computing), but it's one of the few genuinely fresh ideas I've seen in a while. And it's a lot of fun to use (ignoring some bad UX - but hopefully those can be fixed).