[unixbane]

The only reason it's easy to decode (as in, by a casual, not requiring information theoretic techniques or something like file(1)), is because almost all popular character encodings have went far out of their way to map the first 128 bytes to ASCII. This idea that text is the common medium / lowest common denominator is a misconception and why UN*X is buggy and half working. Just because it appears easy to read in common tools doesn't mean you have a correct semantic understanding of it. Text is also inefficient and leads to escaping problems whereby it becomes unreadable again.

[mcswell]

I have no idea what you mean by "this idea that test is the common medium/ lowest common denominator", nor what these "escaping problems" are (I have to escape ASCII codes 0x00 through 0x1f, I guess, but it's unclear to me why that makes the result unreadable, especially since I hardly ever have to escape anything but \n and maybe \t. And the claim that "UN*X is buggy and half working" is just bizarre.

[unixbane]

The UN*X mantra is that text is the common medium and data should be transferred as plain text, as opposed to any other way of encoding data structures like binary.

Escaping problems as in, you embed data structures into text via JSON or XML, and have to write \uXXXX and \" etc, making it unreadable once again.

No, the claim that UN*X is stable is bizzare.