Hello! My name is Thomas and I'm a nerd. I like tech and gadgets and speculative fiction, and playing around with programming. It's not my day job, but I'm working on making it a side gig :)
Plain text is still the only universally available format.
It will load on any device you can possibly think of, and there's only one single thing that can cause incompatibilities between platforms and that's line endings which is a problem that is trivially solved.
Tabs vs spaces? CamelCase or snake_case? These are all inconsequential in the grand scheme of things. If I write some plain text code on this phone then I can share it with literally anyone in the world and it will load and compile/run on their machine.
The only way a new code format can become a replacement for plain text is by achieving the same ubiquitousness.
Plain text is still the only universally available format.
It will load on any device you can possibly think of, and there's only one single thing that can cause incompatibilities between platforms and that's line endings which is a problem that is trivially solved.
Tabs vs spaces? CamelCase or snake_case? These are all inconsequential in the grand scheme of things. If I write some plain text code on this phone then I can share it with literally anyone in the world and it will load and compile/run on their machine.
The only way a new code format can become a replacement for plain text is by achieving the same ubiquitousness.
Good luck with that :)
Plain text code still needs to be executed some way, so it isn't really ubiquitous. And even if it were, why would you need that in practice?