Of course, there's also numerous projects with more significant visual representation, like Blockly, Scratch, flow programming, etc. And, of course, real-time feedback/simulation is another arena of usefulness e.g, http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/people/smcdirm/managedti..., Bret Victor's works, etc. But, I digress.
Ooo, nice! I've hacked unicode to do my own ligatures in a custom editor, but I dream of doing a custom font like this (but in a San Serif proportional way).
Mathematica also probably deserves a shout-out. Not only does it allow you to incorporate graphics, pretty-printed equations with complex 2D layout, and interactive objects right in the language, but it transparently exposes their representations to code (it's a LISP descendant, after all).
• Experiments in Code Typography (McDirmid, Microsoft) http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/liveprogramming...
• Typography of Code (MAX 2010): https://youtu.be/mG0lyGekGDs (alternate recording: https://youtu.be/r2JePjrDggE)
• Elastic tabstops: http://nickgravgaard.com/elastic-tabstops/
Of course, there's also numerous projects with more significant visual representation, like Blockly, Scratch, flow programming, etc. And, of course, real-time feedback/simulation is another arena of usefulness e.g, http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/people/smcdirm/managedti..., Bret Victor's works, etc. But, I digress.