Or it can mean a lot harder to understand and use. With types you get all of the metadata that you might not even have if it was plain text. In addition, ever

Or it can mean a lot harder to understand and use. With types you get all of the metadata that you might not even have if it was plain text. In addition, every application chooses it's own serialization format. In the end, the only programs that compose well are those that work on text, not structured data (i.e. grep, awk, sed, etc...)