How would that work? Would your IDE play back the voice or display animations of the gestures to you.

It just feels as if text is the simplest solution, but I'm open to suggestions.

I would suppose that voice/gesture written code would be stored as text, when reading you could edit via keyboard or your voice/gesture interface. This comes back to languages written for voice - probably if this became feasible a lot of these languages would be compilers from voice to another traditional text target.

But like many people here I have a hard time actually believing this would ever be useful.

For people who spend most of their time clicking with a mouse or pointing at pictures on a phone screen, I could see voice working with things like IFTTT to create simple "programs" or actions. That's essentially what happens when I say "hey Google, turn on living room lights at 6pm".

Someone needed to program the framework for that to happen, but someone also needed to develop the Arduino IDE that I use when I engage in the very limited hobbyist programming that I do. I get to use a simpler interface because someone more specialized and experienced created it with lower level tools.

In a sense, that "if time=18:00 then set livingroom_lights=on" command is a very simple program entered via voice command.