[stcredzero]

If you could marry up the advantages of text/files

Is that really such an advantage? What kind of advantage does having source code scattered in files have over Smalltalk's Change Log? The Change Log greatly simplifies having live code, and having a runtime environment where you could crash the system with a runtime change. Source code in text files complicates this. It's also a powerful development tool all by itself. What's more, it's just a clever use of a text file!

[goatlover]

I mean in being able to generate source code as text files at any point, or update from text files, since that's what programmers are used to, and there are so much of the tooling is built around that. You're not going to be putting an image on github.

[stcredzero]

I mean in being able to generate source code as text files at any point, or update from text files

It has been done many times. There was a Camp Smalltalk initiative to standardize such a mechanism back in the early 2000's. Anyone could code something up that does this for a particular dialect in a matter of minutes.

[Qwertious]

The way I see it, plaintext's advantage is much like the iPhone's stylus-less touchscreen - it's much more direct, and people deal with it much more intuitively as a result. Although I'm starting to think that it's more about not coupling the program and data file, and providing documentation (a comment-less plaintext XML file is often not much more useful than a binary file).