An opaque image is the wrong idea, yes. A structure editor necessarily makes the structure easy to extract and manipulate, like git's tooling makes it easy to work with the git DAG.
Think of code where every blob in the git DAG is one AST node. (Obviously this is horrendously inefficient, this is just an example.) No plaintext.
I'm not talking about that particular subset of visual systems like circuit diagrams or other awkward things like LEGO mindstorms. A good representation would still look like code as you know it, since that's proved to be such an information-dense and useful form. The "view" is the same, but the model has been separated from it.
Think of code where every blob in the git DAG is one AST node. (Obviously this is horrendously inefficient, this is just an example.) No plaintext.
I'm not talking about that particular subset of visual systems like circuit diagrams or other awkward things like LEGO mindstorms. A good representation would still look like code as you know it, since that's proved to be such an information-dense and useful form. The "view" is the same, but the model has been separated from it.