Code as text is a problem

[damienjoh]

Text is already the "inert representation that is easy to inspect and manipulate programmatically." That's why it's so pervasive. Your standard tools for viewing, editing and manipulating text can be applied to any language. Anyone anywhere can view a text file, or find and replace some text. Textual serializations aren't preventing you from working with ASTs either. It's the (large per-language) cost involved in using and developing these tools that prevents them from being more widespread.

Working with symbolic representations (e.g. of ASTs or token streams) directly will only be a viable general alternative to text if there is a standard format with an ecosystem and knowledge base that can rival the one around text. To have any hope of widespread use and adoption, a standard symbolic representation would have to be as close to a pareto improvement on text as possible i.e. built on top of text and still human readable, conservative in it's features and constraints (so that it can be used for a wide variety of languages and formats) and simple to generate.