I couldn't agree more. It's 2010 and we're using text files to describe rules. We're using text files to describe data.
My God. Everyone just stop what we're doing and look at your code. Look at it! It's worse than ugly; it's monstrously stupid. It's idiotic to a degree that beggars the mind. And here we are, in 2010, ignoring the elephant in the room: that code, the way we do it, is petulantly retarded.
People have tried more sophisticated representations than text before. In my experience, they offer little benefit, while throwing away a rich ecosystem of tools that work with text. It seems to me the most promising advancements have been in tools that work intelligently on top of simple text files, rather than trying to replace them.
We can do better.
What would be worse is something like mathematical or musical notation, with non-trivial layout rules and endless ambiguities. Or a complex binary format that only a computer can decode. Text files are actually pretty damn perfect as a simple mapping from computer (raw data) to human (language).
You use a spreadsheet for your budget. You use an accounting system at work. Yet you use a text file to describe the mission critical rules your business runs on.
This is the misconception we've run into: that we think we need to move programming languages to human languages, when human languages are bereft of concision and determinant qualities. We need to move in the opposite direction.
There are subproblems (e.g. state machines) in our craft that benefit enormously from different kind of (visual) representations, but in my opinion textual representations is the best basis for programming.
On the otherhand, you might just hate text files as a way to organize code and would instead use a more elaborate format. Maybe there is better ways, but I think simpler formats fare better when you need to communicate with other people and over organizational boundaries.
I'm struggling to see what is stupid about it.
I'm specifically not naming what I'm talking about because I didn't have it in 1996, when I started; I just had the anger and frustration. That's where you start.
You can't get a solution before you realize there's a problem.
What is this solution then? (It better not involve XML or Excel spreadsheets).