Comment by kevincox

You can come up with a plain text format for any data. The more interesting question is the day to day use.

Right now for most programmers we general work in an editor which does little over the text representation and sometimes edit the first directly as text. We also review code almost entirely as a diff of text. The only exception to this is that we break the text into multiple files and handle each somewhat separately.

This is in start contrast to SAP or Salesforce where the primary interaction is with a specialized UI which treats the "code" more as a graph than text. And dumping to text is primarily used as a backup and is rarely interacted with in that form.