The common denomination in textual coding is text itself: There were historically some differences by locale, encoding, and line ending, but we have managed to

The common denomination in textual coding is text itself: There were historically some differences by locale, encoding, and line ending, but we have managed to converge on a sufficiently encompassing standard with UTF-8 text that the rest can reasonably-if-imperfectly be dealt with by the text processing code, and this is the source of friction: our text editors and terminal emulators are great - so great, that it's hard to get out of the path dependency involved in utilizing them. It isn't just the interactive cursor, or copy-paste, or search-and-replace, or even regular expressions...it's decades of accumulated solutions that can handle every concievable text problem. Every time we go to some other way of describing a document we lose all that text editing infrastructure, which is such a huge setback that no alternate solution has yet hit a widespread critical mass, only specific niches in specific domains. Which doesn't make text good, it makes it worse-is-better! As I see it, the probable way forward would not be in language design, but in formats and editors. Breaking through the dependency will be a slow process.