I’ve heard this many times before but I’ve never heard an argument that rebukes the plain fact that text is extremely expressive, and basically anything else we try to replace it with less so. And it happens that making a von Neumann machine do precisely what you want requires a high level of precision. Happy to understand otherwise!
The text alone isn't the problem. It's the sum of:
1) Plaintext representation, that is
2) a single source of truth,
3) which we always work on directly.
We're hitting hard against limits of 1), but that's because we insist on 2) and 3).
Limits of plaintext stop being a problem if we relax either 2) or 3). We need to be able to operate on the same underlying code ("single source of truth") indirectly through task-specific view, that hide the irrelevant and emphasize the important for the task at hand, which is something that typically changes multiple times a day, sometimes multiple times an hour, for each programmer. The views/perspectives themselves can be plaintext or not, depending on what makes most sense; the underlying "single source of truth" does not have to be, because you're not supposed to be looking at it in the first place (beyond exceptional situations, similar to when you'd be looking at the object code produced by the compiler).
Expressiveness is a feature, but the more you try to express in fixed space, the harder it becomes to comprehend it. The solution is to stop trying to express everything all at once!
N.b. makes me think of a recent exchange I had on HN; people point out that code is like a blueprint in civil engineering/construction - but then, in those fields there is never a single common blueprint being worked on. You have different documents for overall structure, different for material composition, hydrological studies, load analysis, plumbing, HVAC, electrical routing, etc. etd. Multiple perspectives on the same artifacts. You don't see them merge all that into a single "uber blueprint", which would be the equivalent of how software engineers work with code.
How so? Even just hypertext is more expressive than plain text. So is JSON, or any other data format or programming language which has a string type for that matter.
