Portability

Plain-text is the king of portability, because it can be interpreted by a human even if the compiler is lost! To an extent anyway, any sufficiently complex system will have inevitable nuances and implicit assumptions about how the data is interpreted. Formally this might be understood as the Jingle-jangle fallacies respectively. Even within a tightly bound, highly information dense system with continuously updating the agents there is potential for drift into pathological habits or over-assumption of contextual, perspectival understanding.

Language is sedimentary, but true ideas are true whatever the words.