Yeah, we're stuck with plaintext currently. This is because every time someone tries to write a better non-textual language, they fall into the trap of writing

Yeah, we're stuck with plaintext currently. This is because every time someone tries to write a better non-textual language, they fall into the trap of writing a cute toy or flowcharty bullshit--not a robust tool that scales to real codebases. And you can point to Smalltalk and Lisp machines all day, but they have to win, not be mere curiosities that lost gracefully. How do you write a structured code editor that wins against text? It's really, really difficult. I really, really want to fix this--write a real post-plaintext programming environment. I've tried and failed so far (although at least I figured out the data structures) and I have my own life to live, issues to deal with, etc. All hope is not lost though. Rust is shaping up to be the exact foundation the next generation of programming environments needs. We'll get out of this plaintext plateau soon. Re: "Better, more accessible ASTs," this is the aim of Steve Yegge's Grok Project.