[diffxx]

I feel that the problem is not text but language design. A great language should be close to a pareto optimum for both human and machine legibility. Most languages are optimized for human familiarity, which is definitely not the most machine readable format and probably not the most human readable (in a platonic sense).

Being more specific, most languages, in my opinion, are far too permissive with whitespace and use too many keywords. The former leads to there being no canonical form of the program text and results in reliance on external formatting tools, when the compiler could be just automatically enforcing canonical formatting rules. The latter makes it hard to distinguish between types of words, which is why it is almost necessary to rely on syntax highlighting.

If each program has a unique canonical form, it would be very hard to beat text based diffing on that form. Lisp is quite good from the diffing perspective but weaker on human legibility (for most humans).

[AlotOfReading]

Tooling that enforces strict whitespace/formatting rules is a huge pet peeve of mine. It breaks my iteration flow because I have to stop thinking at whatever abstraction layer I'm working at to deal with the minutiae of formatting. I dislike automatic reformats as well, for much the same reason I hate webpages that jump around after loading. Just let me see the code I'm writing without it whizzing off onto adjacent lines because I'm going back and forth over column limits.

[exe34]

an excess of syntactic sugar leads to cancer of the semicolon.