You're going to have to perceive and manipulate your program in some way. Maybe it will be great to get rid of code, but then what will you have instead?
Of course everything can have a textual representation eventually.
Your final question, "what will you have instead?", really nails the point of the article, as that's basically what the author is asking (to be invented).
—but many people have tackled or are tackling this problem ("structure" or "projectional" editor will lead you there if you're curious).
Quoting the article:
> I imagine this model as a relational database - you have tables like `structs`, `fields`, `functions`, `arguments` and relationships between them.
I really want something like that pretty specifically. We still use text to edit data in SQL database, but you can also use queries to view or manipulate it. That's the idea.
But I think you must be referring to the visualizers that many db tools have that, e.g., provide a grid view of a table or view, perhaps with QBE headers (or other means of filtering), etc?
Those kinds of things are nice. They make certain tasks easy to do or certain kinds of questions easy to answer. But they are all limited too -- each is a simplification of the overall problem space (which is why you still need SQL or if not that, some other equally complex query language variant, not to mention a more full-featured language on top of that to do the things SQL doesn't do).
For programming, IDEs are full of this stuff already. Code completion, all kinds of refactoring tools, symbolic searching/browsing. So I'm still not sure what the vision is... I can see that more sophisticated refactoring tools is part of it, but there seems to be a broader idea, but I can't tell what it is.
Programming is more complicated than it needs to be, but it and its tools cannot get simpler than the underlying problems they exist to solve. If we all were working on the same kinds of problems with a bounded, known set of variables, that could all use the same runtime, be hosted in the same kinds of environments, operate on the same kind of hardware, etc., then we could have simple, powerful tools for that (though probably in that case someone would simply solve the general problem, and there wouldn't be any more programmers needed, just sales people).
No no, I really mean SQL text, writing SQL is fine and writing source code, too - I don't have problem with using text to manipulate the program. The problem is when the program is defined by source text.
Let's say a program would just be a single file SQLite database and I'd use text editor and some query console to edit it - that's a rough idea. I can write a function by hand like I do now, but the function is not saved as the literal text, it's saved as few rows in the database. Refactoring is then just running some SQL against that.
IDEs already maintain such a database in memory but they are limited by the textual sources quite a lot (especially when metaprogramming is involved). If you drop textual sources and define the program by the database directly, many IDE features become much simpler to do and accessible to the programmer directly.
I think a really good idea of the direction is the Dion demo somebody posted here. They don't have any scriptability built in, but the idea is very similar. https://media.handmade-seattle.com/dion-systems/