I wish ASCII art would just die. This still looks lousy to me, and now also reminds me that we're trying to draw diagrams by emulating 1980's-era technology.

I wish ASCII art would just die. This still looks lousy to me, and now also reminds me that we're trying to draw diagrams by emulating 1980's-era technology. You don't see people still using CGA graphics for clip art. It was the best we could do, 30 years ago, but today "text" means untrusted Unicode of arbitrary language/script/direction/length, and the number of cases where you can throw it to an output system optimized for displaying "1", "2", "3" is rapidly dwindling.