Comment by Daishiman

Yes, and this carries over very well when talking about code and programs.

Whenever I hear about the stories of the potential of graphical programming languages, "live" code environments living in their own VM, and graph-based logic stuff, the first thing that comes to mind is how come those systems have such a short shelf-life even when some of the concepts behind them are so brilliant.

Between the increased storage space, the interoperability issues, and the exponential difficulty in dealing with non-text media in a variety of operations, there's so much more additional friction to these systems that in the end they're not worth it. Unless, of course, they can be trivially converted to plaintext and parsed as such, then they have a fighting chance.