What do you mean by "large-scale editing work"? Are you talking about the size of the document? The duration of the editing lifecycle? The number of particip

What do you mean by "large-scale editing work"? Are you talking about the size of the document? The duration of the editing lifecycle? The number of participating authors and authoring systems? The full editing/consumption lifecycle for a long lived document that goes through many revisions and publications for several decades? Things I've seen fail with Word in my career that would be unacceptable for programming: - Relatively simple docs being eaten alive, as described in grandparent comment, after several dozen authors make small edits over the course of a few weeks. - Complete change-tracking disasters when attempting to merge concurrent edits to different parts of a document by several authors. - Docs where the WYSIWYG behavior completely changed when opened 5-10 years later by newer versions of Word. Attempting to import/export/save as to rescue it involves much of the same cut-paste and hand recovery described previously. - Docs destroyed by international collaboration, where different locales of each editor seem to accumulate contradictions in the saved document over time. - Inconsistent WYSIWYG between Word on Windows and Word on Mac OS. I don't think it is responsible to promote a programming language that does not have a tooling-independent and platform-independent textual representation that carries ALL program semantics as manipulable, printable character sequences. That promotes disposable code and prevents real programming in the large. (edited to try to rescue bullet list)