[cynwoody]

Text is not a bad form for reading, but it is terrible for storage and computation of programs as it essentially surrenders all syntactic and semantic knowledge (which then have to be recomputed), and they can be accessed/modified by anyone/anything at any time, meaning that a perfectly compilable file may not be compilable in any subsequent compiling (and this is unknowable, again forcing the recalculation [compilation] previously mentioned).

Actually, for reading, text is inferior to even basic HTML markup.

However, for writing computer code, text is fine (as long as you have a decent editor). From time to time, someone comes along with an idea for a graphical programming language, where you create algorithms visually, but these never seem to amount to anything. To be sure, there are fancy IDEs, such as Xcode, which are geared to producing GUI apps. These can help out by generating boiler-plate code, maintaining the project build script, and doing certain refactorings. But, ultimately, you are still left dealing with textual source code, be it Objective C, Java, C#, whatever.

Text is also quite robust for data storage and transmission, e.g., CSV, XML, YAML, JSON. However, binary formats will outperform text, at the cost of some increase in fragility.

[OneWingedShark]

Actually, for reading, text is inferior to even basic HTML markup.

Not really — perhaps for navigation or simplistic formatting. (Both of those are not strictly-speaking "reading".)

However, for writing computer code, text is fine (as long as you have a decent editor). From time to time, someone comes along with an idea for a graphical programming language, where you create algorithms visually, but these never seem to amount to anything.

I think you misunderstand: I'm not saying that the language should be atextual, but that text is unsuitable for storing programs.
As I said before: there is no way to guarantee a textfile is a valid program; on the other hand, a structured data-format can.

To be sure, there are fancy IDEs, such as Xcode, which are geared to producing GUI apps. These can help out by generating boiler-plate code, maintaining the project build script, and doing certain refactorings. But, ultimately, you are still left dealing with textual source code, be it Objective C, Java, C#, whatever.

Yes — and there's a major failing in that they view programs as text.

Text is also quite robust for data storage and transmission, e.g., CSV, XML, YAML, JSON. However, binary formats will outperform text, at the cost of some increase in fragility.

Right.