My statement isn't based on pontificating, it's based on lots of people writing structure-editors and everybody hating them. Despite the end-goal being a corre

My statement isn't based on pontificating, it's based on lots of people writing structure-editors and everybody hating them. Despite the end-goal being a correct parse-tree, it turns out that making it impossible to have intermediate "incorrect" states feels very constricting, and people don't like it. The surface text representation may be an irrelevant detail to the compiler, but it's not to humans. [A lot of the research was aimed at beginners, without previous programming/editor experience, who probably have the most to gain from such assistance (no missing semicolons!), and no prior habits to unlearn. But even there, structure-editors were not popular.]