[jorleif]

I find this idea of a cultural problem interesting, and in my opinion that we program with plain text is essentially a completely arbitrary choice. That said, in practice almost all of the non-plain-text tools I know are some kind of special case tool and then you still need to write source code for all the pieces of the program that don't fit the mold of the GUI tool.

[TuringTest]

It's not as much arbitrary choice as inertia. When the first computer development tools were built the idea to use plain text made sense, and we've been stuck with that decision for more than 50 years. Now our computers are powerful enough so that this technical limitation can be overcome, but the cultural thing and lack of adequate tools are holding the change back.

The book ''The Humane Interface'' described a system that could use WYSIWYG in an environment that allowed general computation, and that book has greatly influenced all modern interaction design, but we're not still there because of all the legacy practices that are still important to the industry.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Humane_Interface