For a step back moving away from text into ASTs there's a bunch of interesting projects.

  * https://unisonweb.org: Unison, a programming language that abstracts names and builds a store of canonical functions
  * https://lamdu.org: Lamdu, a programming language that's meant to be edited as a tree and it's accompanying editor.

There's many more akin projects listed in https://github.com/yairchu/awesome-structure-editors/blob/ma...

I can't wait fast enough for these ideas to reshape how we deal with programs and build stuff.

Also, I wouldn't take too much credit away from projects like Pijul that, maybe more practically, slowly steer us where we want to go. I find it hard to believe that something new will suddenly replace everything given the sheer amount of things that would be left behind and can't rapidly be ported into new shiny technology for various reasons.