Text streams have their advantages and disadvantages. Advantages include being easy to create, modify, view without special tooling. Given the nature of the Uni

Text streams have their advantages and disadvantages. Advantages include being easy to create, modify, view without special tooling. Given the nature of the Unix shell, you can apply that equally to both data and code. Of course, the disadvantage includes the potential of poorly defined streams, or of steams being difficult to interpret due to them being human readable. But that was as true when Unix was created as it is today.