Imagine 50 years ago: “Data passing seems inherently broken in Unix, because all processes must use strings for input and output. Such a model just can't be built on top of.”
As a matter of fact, Tcl/Tk has been doing exactly that since the 1990s. Of course, Tk has been "borrowed" by other languages, Python's tkinter is well-known. Any language using Tk widgets still has to input options in text form. Obviously that's not particularly difficult to accomplish.
