[quantadev]

I think almost all of this applies to ordinary word processing as well as computer code. For example, you could have a "block-based" document editor that handles each paragraph of text as a single "entity", like what Jupyter Notebooks does. Documents have major sections, sub sections, sub-sub sections, etc, and so they're also inherently organizable as a "Tree Structure" instead of just a monolighic string of characters. Microsoft hasn't really figured this out yet, but it's the future.

Google just recently figured this out (That Documents need to be Hierarchical):

https://lifehacker.com/tech/how-to-use-google-docs-tabs

Also interestingly both Documents and Code will some day be combined. Imagine a big tree structure that contains not only computer code but associated documentation. Again probably Jupyter Notebooks is the closest thing to this we have today, because it does incorporate code and text, but afaik it's not fully "Hierarchical" which is the key.

[WillAdams]

Or, one could just use Literate Programming:

http://literateprogramming.com/

[quantadev]

Yep that was the original idea, from way back, although I'm sure somebody in the 1960s thought of it too.

I've had a tree-based block-editor CMS (as my side project) for well over a decade and when Jupyter came out they copied most of my design, except for the tree part, because trees are just hard. That was good, because now when people ask me what my app "is" or "does" I can just say it's mostly like Jupyter, which is easier than starting from scratch with "Imagine if a paragraph was an actual standalone thing...yadda yadda."