sweetspot that is text format programming languages - benclifford/text GitHub Wiki

you can type what you see elsewhere (c.f APL)

additional input complication possibly not worth the additional benefit of more complicated visual representation

2d surface programming - only works for "simple stuff"

complicated ideas in programmers head - written-down/drawn form possibly not going to be able to be general enough to capture that (although for simple ideas / relations in db / UIs that is possible - cf. access UI designer, scratch)

non-interactive visual stuff, for example, might fit in a 2d UI but how do you present interactive/changing behaviour?

when people write text-like stuff but use lambda symbols etc that aren't immediately available on a regular keyboard - this violates the rule about being able to type what you see (there's a reason I wrote "lambda" there rather than λ which took me 20 seconds to go find in google) - that might make things more readable in a read-a-PDF-of-a-maths-paper sense, but at the cost of typeability

this might not be the only sweetspot, but it is a sweetspot

This also applies, I think, to use of colours to contain original meaning (rather than highlighting meaning) - in ColorForth in the input language; and in Idris error messages, which are coloured but that makes them lose some of their meaning when pasted as plain text.

"don't display things I cannot type"