This article makes exactly the same mistake that pretty much everyone else suggesting programmer tooling beyond plain text has made: assuming it has to be either or, that if we want more sophisticated tools that use a more complex representation, we have to give up text.
The suggestion is a nonstarter. Network effects alone would prevent the world making such a move, and it's a good thing, because the loss wouldn't be just a particular existing tool, it would be the entire universe of tools that work with text, that the world has spent decades developing, most of which any individual has never even heard of, let alone thought about how to replace.
It's also completely unnecessary. If you want a tool that lets you view and edit your code in a fancy table format, you can write one. All it needs to do is parse the existing source code into whatever internal format it wants and write it out again afterwards. Yes I know the author criticizes parsers, but really, writing reliable parsers has been done often enough to make it clear that it's a solvable problem. And would it not be better to have some of what you're looking for in an actual tool than all of it in an imaginary one?
The suggestion is a nonstarter. Network effects alone would prevent the world making such a move, and it's a good thing, because the loss wouldn't be just a particular existing tool, it would be the entire universe of tools that work with text, that the world has spent decades developing, most of which any individual has never even heard of, let alone thought about how to replace.
It's also completely unnecessary. If you want a tool that lets you view and edit your code in a fancy table format, you can write one. All it needs to do is parse the existing source code into whatever internal format it wants and write it out again afterwards. Yes I know the author criticizes parsers, but really, writing reliable parsers has been done often enough to make it clear that it's a solvable problem. And would it not be better to have some of what you're looking for in an actual tool than all of it in an imaginary one?