> you can make a flat text file which doesn't map correctly onto AST; if you operate on AST, you still can create invalid AST, so not much of a change there.

> you can make a flat text file which doesn't map correctly onto AST; if you operate on AST, you still can create invalid AST, so not much of a change there. > There are disputes about how the text file should be formatted Solved by autoformatters. > Parsing is slow and difficult that's the only drawback so far > Your editor is an interface for interacting with that AST So now you can't use your text editor, and must use something that understand specific AST (and even specific version of that AST). Any change to that AST will require all the tools to be updated, while currently any text editor or processor can be used to edit any programming language in any version. So you just created massive problem with the tooling. Your grep, documentation generator, sed and countless other text tools just stopped working.