Creating a programming system where the primary representation of a program is not text, but rather a dynamic data structure is the core idea behind Intentional Programming (Charles Simonyi's post-Microsoft company).

    http://intentsoft.com/technology/overview.html

This is Charles's ultimate "going meta" idea to try to advance programming beyond our 1960's metaphor representing programs as raw text.

It's not been widely adopted, so the company is selling it into markets where you want domain experts to be able to "write code" rather than have them hand off a spec to a programmer. It's kind of a domain specific language (DSL) compiler generator.