Reasons we use text: - It's very close to the computer's "native language"; a raw series of bytes on disk can be stored and processed efficiently, and are anal

Reasons we use text: - It's very close to the computer's "native language"; a raw series of bytes on disk can be stored and processed efficiently, and are analogous to the binary form, which has to be a series of bytes - It's visually compact, so you can view a large amount of complexity per screen space - It can be created and edited purely by keyboard. I'm not an anti-mouse zealot - I often use it when I'm going back and tweaking code - but nobody can deny that the keyboard is a faster and more direct way of getting new ideas out of your head and into the computer I also think there's value in being able to get down to the baseline and see the "raw stuff" that makes up a program. Being able to see that full definition with no layers of indirection, even if you always use layers of indirection when actually working on it. None of these are insurmountable, but I think they'd have to all be addressed by any true graphical replacement for textual code. Personally my vote is for a more fully graphical editor that still operates on textual code underneath, which can still be read by humans on its own.