I actually used a language and editor like this in a previous large company.

It was an experimental language that they wanted to replace their current application level language and was built ontop of JetBrains MPS https://www.jetbrains.com/mps/ which has that feature among others.

My personal opinion after working with that lang is all of this is that its theoretically interesting. But a dead end in practice along with visual coding etc.

The universality, simplicity, and legibility of text as interface for both humans and machines is too hard to beat. I think LLMs is just the most recent example of this.

Things that don't work in practice:

- You need a special editor, its heavy and slow, you lose all the ecosystem around them.

- You can't just cat or inspect the raw file, you can't see it in terminal at all.

- You need a new version control system, review system, and people need to learn it.

- You can't use any existing tools for working with code, you are essentially starting from scratch, and lose all the benefits of all the work everyone else is doing around tooling, dev saas etc.

- humans don't think in trees, they don't think in syntactically correct programs. Its actually absurdly frustrating writing a program in only syntactically correct edits. 99% of the time you are coding, your work is probably syntactically and semantically incorrect.

The tooling that is able to either make the right tradeoff around strictness or allow the users to make the that tradeoff is what ends up being used in practice. A good example of this typescript with gradual typing, python with type annotations, etc.

I think these editors just fall in a bit too far right on the strictness scale.