I agree with your post. That said, maybe the problem is the text. There are many artificial problems we create for ourselves by using strings for everything. P

I agree with your post. That said, maybe the problem is the text. There are many artificial problems we create for ourselves by using strings for everything. Programming languages in particular have upper limits on expressiveness due to syntax issues. We can't easily annotate expressions or types with extra details without filling the screen with symbols; characters don't scale. Keying every resource with a unique human-readable string causes import conflicts, broken backwards compatibility, and hundred-line diffs - all in the name of renaming one function. Mistakes like ambiguous identifier-scope lookups, block structure/indentation mismatches, and operator precedence issues eat up valuable programmer hours repeatedly, in exactly the same way each time. We've designed better languages to mitigate these effects, but we can only do so much. We can do static analysis to catch common errors and incremental compilation in the editor itself, but the heuristics can only work in a fraction of innumerable cases. Even simple syntax highlighting is intractable in many cases. If we programmed in structure with an AST-aware editor, whole classes of artificial problems would vanish in an instant. (To be replaced by the UI issues of a whole different paradigm in editors...) Well, there are plenty of people working toward this, myself included. We'll see.