I've mentioned this a few times on past articles on HN, but I think the issue is we're marrying two different concepts with text based programming languages, namely presentation and representation. Consider - in an idealized context - HTML and CSS. One being the representation, the other being the presentation or more accurately how to present the representation. A user can change how the HTML is presented to them without changing the HTML directly. I think something like this would be useful for programming source code.
So as a thought experiment for this in terms of programming, the source code would be some backing representation that you edit which can be rendered in any way a user desires, including back to regular text as we have now. Tooling (compilers/interpreters, version control, editors, etc) would deal primarily with the representation rather than the presentation.
I think this would also solve a lot of problems that tooling ends up dealing with. Consider version control not having to deal with formatting changes because that's just an artifact of how a programmer chooses to render the representation rather than the representation itself. Autoformatters (gofmt, clang-format, etc) would be less about putting source code in a canonical format for the sake of tooling and more about rendering source code as text in a particular chosen way for individual programmers. Similar for tooling such as IDE code folding or refactoring, document generation, etc.
This is actually something I have been pondering for a decade at this point. I have no idea how a system such as this could be implemented such that it is general and sound enough to be usable. But I still think it would be a neat way to program.