> I've never understood why we still look at the plain text representation of code, and not a visualization of the code that makes more sense.

I suppose this is because nobody has been able to create good tooling for it (the visualization itself, the efficient editing, etc). You'll have to deal with the text version of it at some point if not all tools that we rely on get a version for the new visualization.

Another hypothesis is that it might not matter this much that we work with text directly after all.

> Note that, in my mind, this visualization is not automatically generated, but lovingly created by humans who wish their code to be understood by others.

If you allow manual crafting there, I suspect you'll need some sort of linting too.

Um isn't that what Lisp and its children / siblings have been all about. I've written a bit of Closure it has a very clear idea that code is data and data is code. Your code is trivially serializable in your mind and by various tools, and because it is lisp - it all kinda makes sense.

I really wish we lived in a universe where a lisp became the lengua franca of the world instead of javascript, as almost happened with Netscape, but alas ...