[jopsen]

> The problem is more about the underlying unit being text.

I think richer editing, in effect editing the AST, rather than the concrete syntax is interesting.

But I'm not convinced that it's a blocker for making more declarative code. I think macros will get us very very far. The procedural stuff in rust, has me really excited about the future.

The downside of not using text as the underlying unit of truth is that you have to reinvent an IDE, version control, conflict resolution, review tools, etc. That takes a LOT of buy-in.

If you can 90% of syntactic sugar required from macros (and the like), you can work on the actual abstractions / declarations instead of the compiler toolchain.

Just my two cents.