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Always Bet on Text (2014)

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Re: Always Bet on Text (2014)

#11

Post by kstenerud »

Yes, there's a reason why the command line and shells are still a thing. Text supports a wider range of expression than any other medium we've developed thus far (and not for lack of trying!). Even Steve Jobs in his never-ending quest for UX minimalism couldn't eradicate the keyboard from the iPhone, despite all their UI innovations.

Text is also why XML, JSON, and Markdown are a thing.

When you can accomplish your tasks within a constrained range of expressivity, you do that (gas & break pedals, steering wheel, door handles, etc). But when you need greater expressivity, you're probably going to need text.

Re: Always Bet on Text (2014)

#12

Post by zokier »

Ygg2 wrote: post #6
chordalkeyboard wrote: post #2

> Text is the most efficient communication technology. By orders of magnitude. This blog post is likely to take perhaps 5000 bytes of storage, and could compress down to maybe 2000; by comparison the following 20-pixel-square image of the silhouette of a tweeting bird takes 4000 bytes: Author is really excited about really old information technology. He makes some good points.

It's solid technology to be excited about. For example. Graphical programming languages are nowhere. Closest I had was either VHDL or backed by copious amounts of XML like Xtend. And both of those have a textual Component as well.

Most programming languages would be better characterized as tree structures than text, being only obscured by unclear (but no less rigid) syntax.

Re: Always Bet on Text (2014)

#13

Post by montebicyclelo »

> text is the most powerful, useful, effective communication technology ever, period.

On the other hand, many (technical/mathematical) concepts are more effectively explained using diagrams/images.

E.g. the very visual approach taken in Mathologer videos [1] makes difficult, esoteric, mathematical ideas accessible to a wider audience.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iJ8pnCO0nTY

Re: Always Bet on Text (2014)

#14

Post by hrishi »

Agreed, with a counterpoint:

Text is efficient at transmitting data. If I want to describe a concept or an event, text is king.

However, media is more efficient at transmitting sentiment. It will take you far more than 4000 bytes of text to transmit the feeling or emotion an icon can convey, when used well. This is why we've (as a species) started using emojis, and why media leans to emotion and sentiment while text leans to data.

This is an exaggeration, life is almost always a grey area - but I hope you get my point.

Re: Always Bet on Text (2014)

#16

Post by necovek »

virgilp wrote: post #8

I would like to add that text, as a thousand-years-old-technology, has always included illustration too. Even in recent/digital text, you have this bird that doesn't take 4k bytes: [edit: unfortunately hackernews doesn't display the unicode character U+1F426] Text is very powerful, but it doesn't need to always work by itself (arguably works best together with other media)

While I totally agree with the OP, the point to remember is that text is a really terse storage as long as you have the Unicode mapping already stored to transform the binary compressed form to actual pictures of text (vs abstract forms or numeric codepoints when simply stored as "textual" bytes).

This does not diminish the value and expressiveness of text, but it needs to be said that in 5000 years time we'll need both the Unicode specification and those 2-4000 bytes to decipher the author's post.

It's just a cost of digital media.

The bigger issue is how do we ensure digital media perseveres for so long.

Re: Always Bet on Text (2014)

#17

Post by msiyer »

If we agree that a picture is worth 1000 words, then...

Given the current state of information technology, I agree that we are most efficient at processing text. However, that can change pretty quickly. Storage mechanisms similar to DNA can make the difference between text and multimedia irrelevant. It will happen because nature already does that.

Re: Always Bet on Text (2014)

#19

Post by necovek »

KMag wrote: post #9

Side note: the author is Graydon Hoare, creator of the Rust programming language.

That's really interesting, so thanks!

However, I am not sure if that is supposed to affect my opinion of his take on text vs other media? (I try not to let prejudices like "he's a really smart person" affect me when discussing a topic that is very approachable to a wider population)

Re: Always Bet on Text (2014)

#20

Post by tannhaeuser »

Ygg2 wrote: post #6
chordalkeyboard wrote: post #2

> Text is the most efficient communication technology. By orders of magnitude. This blog post is likely to take perhaps 5000 bytes of storage, and could compress down to maybe 2000; by comparison the following 20-pixel-square image of the silhouette of a tweeting bird takes 4000 bytes: Author is really excited about really old information technology. He makes some good points.

It's solid technology to be excited about. For example. Graphical programming languages are nowhere. Closest I had was either VHDL or backed by copious amounts of XML like Xtend. And both of those have a textual Component as well.

I agree, but it makes me sad that we've come to see XML as primarily tech for serialization of component models, service payloads, and configs; that is, all the things that XML should not be used for. When actually SGML from which it's derived is all about text editing and using minimal markup to create implicit textual hierarchy.
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