Beyond J, similar visualizations help with "just what is happening here?!?" issues with macros, multiple dispatch, inline caching and code, optimization, collaborative compilation, and so on.
Javascript has a trend towards fully-deterministic checked styles, supporting the dream of ASTs being the canonical representation, and making it easier to do representational editing.
When onboarding someone to a program in a J-like language, eyeball abstractions (phrases and patterns repeatedly used, but not named) will get described. What if an IDE can capture those, without compromising the clarity of code brevity?
> I wonder if it would be possible to just code in a gui like this directly.
So I hope and expect to see much more of this in the years ahead. Yay.