[kareemamin]

I think you are right. It's much easier to compare old and new versions of a program if they are text. But we also should remember that we developed tools like diff to work with programming in text. If instead we were using a different paradigm we could explore the equivalent of diff in that model. Merge conflicts in text are often not real logic conflicts but just re-ordering things in a text file, or formatting changes. If we used a projectional editor, one that treats code as an AST instead of just flat text like lamdu - https://github.com/lamdu/lamdu we would need to create a new way to look at the evolution of changes in the code but it could be more meaningful than just looking at text.

Also you could have a timeline that shows you what got changed instead of comparing two text files. There can be lots of ways to achieve the same goal, understanding what changed and how, than just diffing two text files.