Hey, I'm one of those "IDE people". :-) But I've posted something similar to what is described here just the other day: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3

Hey, I'm one of those "IDE people". :-) But I've posted something similar to what is described here just the other day: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34232549 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34232549 The thing we interact on the surface should stay "text like" of course. But the tools used should work on the actual data structure (and this should be also what ends up it on disk). Proper editors (and IDEs) do this partly anyway. Only that things get converted (loosely!) back and forth between the internal representation of the IDE and the text on disk. The compiler than again extracts the rich data form the text, over and over. Pure madness… If just the LISP machine would have won… Things would likely look much better now. We would work with rich ASTs instead of text blobs I guess.