This was, in fact, more or less pioneered in languages that aren't homoiconic in the same manner as Lisp is (code that used self-modification for reasons like time or space optimization was, if not common, at least known of in the early days of electronic computers). Arguably, machine code is very much homoiconic; what is beautiful about Lisp is that the underlying structure of program/data is regular and nicely-abstracted.