frobisherw | Why access to bit sequences is liberating

Sonata recently wrote a post titled, "The OS should provide a statically typed environment." which included the following:

Rule of thumb: if you're doing it right, a programming language shouldn't have a "syntax". It should have IDEs that write typed ASTs.

I disagreed, in what I think is an interesting way. I commented with the following:

All digital data is a sequence of bits -- that's always going to be true. I agree that not all (or even lots) of digital data should be treated as a sequence of Unicode codepoints; but claiming that data is really typed ASTs... isn't accurate. Lots of data can be treated as typed ASTs -- but it's still really a sequence of bits.

And the idea that a single sequence of bits can (or should) only be interpreted as one particular "type" -- that's misleading, and unnecessarily limiting. I want to retain access to the underlying bit sequence, so if my usual IDE's interpretation of it is insufficient, I can use a different program to interpret it differently. If the IDE (or the whole OS) refuses me access to the actual bit sequence -- then I'm a prisoner of the assumptions of whoever wrote the "blessed" IDE. Fuck that noise.