Interesting perspective, but considering how much everyone seems to want software, I think we have to say that the commons also captures a lot of the same value from plain text that the programmers do. That might work out to less of a negative externality than just a trade-off for everyone, especially when you consider the positive effects on the commons of the network effects that text makes easier.
Interesting counterpoint. It would come down to how things net out. And it won't be stable over time. I'm still of the view that programmers systematically overvalue their convenience, because it's a value/cost tradeoff that they directly experience.
Fair. I do think the long term goal should be a compact binary format with equal or better tooling as plain text. Goodness knows there are enough formats and structural editors out there, so in principle we only need to standardize on one, but it seems none of them are actually quite good enough yet.
The tooling, though, we need the ubiquitous tooling. But that's not really a technical problem. :P Maybe when I pitch my hat in the structural editor ring I'll try to do an Avro editor.
