Is your programming language made of multidimensional plasma?

Well, maybe not plasma, but rather the liquid metal that the later Terminator models are made of. So what am I talking about here?

Well, consider a Turing machine with its infinite paper tape. Definitely a one-dimensional programming language closest to the machine and I guess it's made of, well, paper tape. Not so easy to modify a program, you're probably best off just making a new tape. Disregarding other forms of esoteric languages, a computer with only a single instruction can actually be useful. Although since it doesn't have infinite memory, perhaps that is not even fully one-dimensional.

Moving on, the statements and computations in FORTRAN are much easier to specify, we've moved up to a higher dimension/plane, but essentially the language is still mostly one-dimensional, being a linear sequence of statements. Since you can jump around, maybe you could consider it being slightly higher than one dimension, but nowhere near two, and the syntax/layout of the language really doesn't show the increased structure well. FORTRAN is definitely made of cards, you can shuffle them around, remove some and add others.

Even LISP is mostly one-dimensional with a program being, well, a list. To be fair, the program is really a list of lists forming a tree and the opening and closing parentheses allow a freer use of the two-dimensional text area, so we're much closer to being two-dimensional, and I suppose you can choose to visualize that in better or worse ways. I'm not sure what LISP is made of since I haven't used LISP in anger, perhaps movable type? Or do macros make it more like liquid metal because it can morph shape? How free is the morphing, how much does it necessarily need to reflect the underlying structure? How brittle is the program under change? What happens if, for example, a parenthesis is misplaced?

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