[yairchu]

> So why do we bother with all that coding style stuff if we could make an IDE that edits the program itself instead of text? (I get that text is a universal format, but that doesn't mean we have to edit it directly.)

A huge benefit of text is that if you learn to read code, you already know how to edit it too. This is because of WYTIWYS: What you type is what you see.

Higher level edits and refactoring are awesome, but when you just start using the environment you can't learn all the refactorings yet, while you only want to enter something similar to the code you saw on the whiteboard in class etc. WYTIWYS makes it easy.

Historically, many attempts at structural or projectional editors didn't adhere to WYTIWYS. I believe that this is a major reason for why they haven't gained popularity.

But recently there are several projects developing projectional editors which do adhere to WYTIWYS!

One is Lamdu (http://www.lamdu.org) (btw I'm one of its developers). In Lamdu we try to create a programming language with a friendly projectional editor which does adhere to WYTIWYS and also offers awesome unique features that projectional editors enable. (for more information see our short videos - https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCgvPEOFglvS4_ZEHi-PEctQ )

Another projectional editor adhering to WYTIWYS is Jetbrains MPS (https://www.jetbrains.com/mps/) . This one isn't limited to a single programming language! It is a general purpose language workbench.