[vidarh]

> Like, why do we still use plain text in flat files for source code

Text transports with full fidelity between print and screen, and between pretty much any system.

Anything beyond text becomes a) harder to communicate (e.g. consider how many people would struggle with even reading out loud maths formulas with symbols they are unfamiliar with; now extend that to trying to talk about representations that have extra spatial information), b) requires extra tooling for far more varied environments than you ever thought people actually code in (e.g. I have an idea; I want to write down code in my phones note-taking app)

Serializing it for IO is trivial. Representing it in a way that allows us to handle the two problems above in a way that makes it seem superior to text in enough cases is a very, very hard problem.

It's definitively intersting, though.