> Personally I’ve not found the ability to open my css files in Word beneficial!

Imagine writing a blog about your favorite CSS features. I mean, if you use Word at all for writing, wouldn't that come handy?

But Word actually is not the primary goal here. grep or awk may be more important - I've created ad-hoc tools for ad-hoc quick-and-dirty tasks on code a number of times, and the fact that code is just text helped a lot. Taking that away would make me spend time on figuring out how to hook up text tools to that format.

> Many editors are already altering what is stored on disc before presenting it to you

True, but the difference is between being able to enrich commonly understood format, and not having a common format between different tools at all.

Yeah, I was definitely kidding when I was referring to Word.

I do feel sad that we're still restricted to tools like grep and awk that treat everything as dumb text, and I think it holds us back hugely. I much prefer the powershell model of everything is an object. You can easily extend it with C#.

I appreciate that the unix philosophy has gotten us to incredible places, but I do wish we could rip off some of the training wheels and take advantage of the computing power that we have available to us that was just unthinkable. My mobile phone is more powerful than could possibly have been imagined when we make restricted itself to tab as a delimiter, and I'm currently using it as a coaster to save my table from water marks.

The problem of powershell model it's a closed system. If it does X, it's awesome. If it doesn't X, but there's a tool that does X and doesn't speak the same language powershell speaks - you are out of luck. That's where simple exchange formats win - they can combine tools from different domains. If I have a system that can do X using SuperDuperObjectProtocol and then another one doing Y which uses EvenBetterDifferentObjectProtocol - doing X+Y is a project that could take months if not years. If they both input and output some common easy format - like text or JSON or CSV - I can likely hooks them up in a lazy afternoon. It's not the question of processing power - all the super-comupters in the world would not make the task of hooking up SuperDuperObjectProtocol with EvenBetterDifferentObjectProtocol easier. It's the question of complexity, which always appears on the edges of domains.

I think that falling back to the lowest common denominator is an immense cause of complexity in software, and holds us back back. I think we'd be much better off if we didn't optimise for "person who wants to write a CLI in haskell who is using an 18 year old version of bash that only runs on Plan9"