We could definitely do better than a one dimensional string of ASCII characters for programming. See, for example, the following glorious mutant: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/APL_(programming_language%29 Check out Conway's game of life implementation further down on that page.

My pet issue is how difficult it is to have native support (both UI and data structure wise) for graphs in a programming language, given how ubiquitous graphs are in mathematics and computer science.