Also the reason why for me it's essential to use an editor (usually an IDE) that works with the AST when using other languages. But it's a good point you make.

Also the reason why for me it's essential to use an editor (usually an IDE) that works with the AST when using other languages. But it's a good point you make. If lisp (or lua tables or any kind of tree) were the base structure for everything instead of bytes it really would be a huge jump up. (There were probably many attempts at this including Charles Simonyi s language based workbench and also in the eclipse world with EMF as the basic tree .. urbit/nock etc etc)