You mean like the 'pic' language? http://floppsie.comp.glam.ac.uk/Glamorgan/gaius/web/pic-20.h...

Developed in 1982. Present on almost every UNIX-like system and integrated into the manpage generator.

Probably the main reason we've not seen things like this achieve wide adoption is the small but very influential subset of programmers who refuse to use anything that isn't a pure text terminal for development.