writing computer programs in plain text files is ridiculously old fashioned.
are documents created in plain text? no. there are WYSIWYG
editors and rich document formats. are images created in plain text?
no. there are great painting tools where you can visualize and manipulate
them in 2D. are three dimensional models created in plain text? again, no.
there are tools that visualize and manipulate them in the 3D domain. so are computer
programs the 1D stream of characters which plain text files efficiently
represent? NO! so why are they created and represented in such a restrictive,
incapable format? hardware has advanced so much faster than software
because of this insistence of expressing software in plain text.

better tools are needed to create and manipulate the abstractions of computer
programs, but these tools are very difficult to create when they must
operate on plain old text files. the source for programs needs to be authored,
viewed, stored, and manipulated by tools in a much more advanced representation.

a simple example is renaming a variable. what you want to do is... rename a
variable. but what you have to do currently is find and replace all sequences
of some set of characters with some new set of characters but only certain
instances of that set of characters that correspond to some abstract concept
that is represented implicitly somewhere or throughout the full set of characters.
wtf. no wonder programming tools are taking so long to advance!

programmers are too complacent. they naively going about editing text files, finding
and replacing strings of characters, copying and pasting plain text, typing the
same things over and over, and typing the same things in multiple places. they do all
these activities that bear little to no resemblance to the actual actions they
are performing on abstractions that all that text feebly attempts to represent.