One of the goals the VPRI team had in the STEPS project was to put together a WYSIWYG document editor. They did so within their 20,000 total lines of code limit

One of the goals the VPRI team had in the STEPS project was to put together a WYSIWYG document editor. They did so within their 20,000 total lines of code limit. Which isn't to say that doing it is easy just because the amount of code needed is small - it's more a statement about the industrialized model of coding that we've chained ourselves to. Nobody can afford the pure-research grade of time and dedication to build and iterate towards a beautiful design that is not just engineered well, but aspires to a mathematical grade of implementation with not a character wasted. So we build ungainly things to meet our hair-on-fire needs, and copy things out of them when happenstance allows them to be reused. And so in all likelihood we're constantly, invisibly shortchanging the future because we have to focus on shipping our shovelware instead. And I think the text files end up being part of that, because they're precisely the protocol that makes it so easy for stuff to be copied _inelegantly_. We bend everything around whether it's easy to copy from text and whether the editor we already use can read it.