When I'm working with Lisp in Emacs using Paredit, I am not editing text. Instead it is an interface to the expressions directly. I add, remove, transpose, cut, paste, move around, up and down, all with whole expressions at a time.
If someone were to build a new structural editor for programs, I could only hope it is as good as Paredit.
It's not as hip as Lips/Emacs, but Java/Eclipse works in much the same way. IDEs with deep introspection capabilities are great. I hate all those mini refactorings when I'm programming Javascript or Coffeescript.
Exactly, a usable structure editor is extremely difficult to write.
The problems with Lisp are that your source code ends up flattened into plaintext in the end, and that identifiers and symbols must be resolved by string lookup; there is no "first-class" reference, just a collection of resolution rules and environments and symbol manglers. You could fix these, but you wouldn't really have Lisp anymore.
When I'm working with Lisp in Emacs using Paredit, I am not editing text. Instead it is an interface to the expressions directly. I add, remove, transpose, cut, paste, move around, up and down, all with whole expressions at a time.
If someone were to build a new structural editor for programs, I could only hope it is as good as Paredit.