[vilya]

> I have long wanted to see programmers experiment with taking this IDE thing much further. Almost every other authoring tool has an opaque file format, manipulated via one or more views. E.g. when a digital artist wants to create and manage a complex 3D scene, they use a tool like Maya. They're not fussed about whether they can read the file format!

Interesting choice of example, because over the last few years open formats like Pixar's USD (https://graphics.pixar.com/usd/docs/index.html) have been emerging for managing complex 3D scenes - precisely because of problems with opaque file formats.

That said, we're now seeing more and more things like Unreal Engine's Blueprints, Apple's "Swift Playgrounds" and so on. I think your wish is slowly coming true.