Text works and is hard because it's a projection of a mental representation. The whole reason we can work with N-dimensional structures in text is because the dimensionality lives in the programmer's head. There isn't really any other way to represent say a >3 dimensional array other than laboriously flattening it into text and expecting the next guy to rotate the hypercube in his mind. That's neither a good nor bad thing, it's purely a fact of our 3+1 dimensional universe.

A shocking number of problems can be best represented in higher dimensions and there's simply no way to encode that information losslessly. Being simple 3D creatures (I'd argue 2D in fact) the only way to do that is by projecting it down into a lower-dimensional space.