Ask HN: Why hasn't visual programming taken over?

I should hope it's obvious I don't want everything to be written in scratch. But consider this: the base unit of code is the character. I use vim because it's the best at manipulating characters. Your IDE (visual studio, intellij, etc.) understands your code on the AST level, but when you edit with it, you're still editing on the character level. It still performs character-to-character transformations, even if it uses that knowledge. Your code is still saved as a plain text file.

And this has caused all sorts of problems. For instance, you can make a flat text file which doesn't map correctly onto AST; this is called a syntax error. There are disputes about how the text file should be formatted (tabs or spaces?). Parsing is slow and difficult. Sometimes you misalign something; that only occurs because tokens have no boundaries.

Now consider the alternative: code is stored as a binary AST. Your editor is an interface for interacting with that AST, your compiler deserialises that AST directly into memory. An entire class of problems is eliminated. Whether your editor understands your code on an AST level is no longer a question. Yet, at the same time, the barrier to entry for writing an intelligent editor is significantly lowered. Same for writing a compiler. You get a lot more choice in terms of how you want your code formatted. Want your python code with braces, or your c code without? Done. The language itself doesn't even have braces or colons anymore. Any tool that parses code runs a lot faster. And we don't even need a new language! All we need do is define an AST format for a given pre-existing language.

I'll readily admit, my title was a bit clickbaity. There is some work on such editors. And the answer to my question is trivial: inertia. But the time has come to overcome that inertia, for the sake of all the wasted electricity and lost productivity. So here's what my post title should have been: 'Ask HN: will you help me write tomorrow's IDE?'