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I agree. I see major practical obstacles:

General purpose editing of structured data. Org-mode is the closest thing I know of but it is still infuriatingly ad-hoc and text-first.

Grepping (search in) and diff/patch of structured data. While many text manipulations are easy to implement in search/replace manner, structured data are more involved.

Errors and other kinds of unexpected input/output. Semantics of unix process failure are clear. State of the system after one process crashes is readily known. We can compare the filesystem before/after.

If we instead throw an exception in object-oriented runtime, the result is not so easy to analyze or compare, there may be dangling references or other complications. I don't know of any language runtime that can dump itself whole in (semi-)readable format for later comparisons.



Smalltalk can.




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