I am not a programming language expert, but hobbyist/amateur, so generally I defer to people who do this stuff for a living. My only points are:

(a) The space of possible languages is large.

(b) It would be curious indeed if ASCII lines was the optimum for a species with such a strong visual subsystem.

(c) Computer science community has a terrible institutional memory for its own advances (e.g. LISP code is its own syntax tree with hardly any parsing, Perl's garbage collector for the longest time failed on circular references, etc.) So progress is slow.

These I take as evidence that there is much more progress to be made just on notation and representation.