One of the major stubling blocks to realizing the promise of Intentional Programming (IP) is building up the data structure that abstractly represents the source. Fortunately, Eclipse's AST provides most of the necessary functionality.

The next and largest stumbling block is deriving a suitable representation for visualizing and manipulating "code" in a more abstract way. The technology is in place to implement the representation: Eclipse's GEF. Unfortunately, there is no already defined representation that provides the necessary granularity to effectively manipulate "code". UML falls short unfortunately as it does not provide the necessary degree of granularity.

I suppose that my idea is that we need an idea for an abstract, yet granular representation of "code". I will, at some point in the near future, write up some requirements for this representation and provide some example code that demonstrates the difficulty of the task at hand.