Author here. I chose the biology references for two reasons. 1) I love nature 2) It seemed to provide the most distant examples of IR from what most of us are familiar with.

Of course compilers are probably the most obvious example of Intermediate Representation and form the basis for much of the computer science we draw on any time we compose an IR in code. That, to me, made it less compelling for a feature in this brief essay. I like that my example of an IR in Swift was designed, while the biology examples of IR are not deliberately designed but rather landed upon during extremely chaotic evolution. That contrast compelled me to reference biology, instead of the more immediately adjacent body of work around compilers. Of course I’m not the best author… maybe I chose poorly.

Regarding Notion and blocks — I suspect Notion chose the block architecture because it is maximally agnostic (it is kind of an IR in its own right), allowing for rapid development of anything upstream or downstream of those blocks. Maybe one of their early team members was inspired in some way by the field of IR, or otherwise intuited this design.

> Kind of sounds like this ought to be an OS feature. Why can't you drag anything into anything else?

It is an OS feature -- IMO macOS has some of the most advanced and widespread drag-and-drop of any consumer operating system. A lot of the conventional wisdom has been lost in the face of SwiftUI, though.

Or how I can't prompt in Haskell to add our format to Pandoc.