I assumed from reading the excerpt in the github issue that each emoji represented an actor or asynchronous action to make it obvious which parts of the story corresponded to technical concepts, but the documentation wasn't 100% consistent on this. When it got to discussing parallelizing actions, it was easy to represent multiple bank tellers with emoji. I can see how it would be very off-putting, though.
Too many emojis in 'Concurrency and async / await' explanation
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Re: Too many emojis in 'Concurrency and async / await' explanation
#12Maybe I'm just an old man yelling at clouds, but I always found the use of emoticons and emoji in official documents extremely off putting. If you want to look hip and cool, at least do so only where appropriate - public-facing technical documentation needs to be articulate and maximally accessible. Not to mention how inconvenient it is to actually add emoji. Chances are that the person who wrote that page didn't dra…
Ctrl+Cmd+Space brings up an emoji picker on macOS, you don’t have to paste anything
Also Windows + . in Windows and KDE Plasma (needs to be configured previously), and Control + Shift + E in Gnome.
Re: Too many emojis in 'Concurrency and async / await' explanation
#13I respect the usage of a couple of them in something like that even if I haven't (and I won't), but that overuse is like the late 90s gifs in personal websites, not only looks unprofessional, but also difficult the reading of the document.
Re: Too many emojis in 'Concurrency and async / await' explanation
#14Aren't emojis supposed to replace words, kind of like abbreviations? What's the point of having a word and an emoji that mean the same thing right next to each other? I would never write, "want a hamburger :hamburger:?" Instead, I would just write, "want a :hamburger:?" This just seems like the worst of both worlds. EDIT: HN doesn't seem to support emojis. Changed to a markdown like format instead.
I don't use them this way. I use them to emote or in a way that's almost like punctuation. If I replace words, I'm probably being obnoxious on purpose.
Re: Too many emojis in 'Concurrency and async / await' explanation
#15I have a rant about "object emojis" and "feelings emojis". The short version is: using emojis to express emotion is great, using them to talk about objects sucks. This documentation is using them to talk about objects, which sucks. In those cases either you have to parse them mentally, or read every word they replace twice (like in that documentation). It's bad. We have a thing to talk about objects in text: text. Words, letters, stuff like that.
"Feeling emojis" are great because they emulate non-verbal communication. A smile is a smile, a thumbs up is a "hm" or "okay". Text communication is by nature asynchronous so we have to find ways to cope with that. On the other hand, documentation doesn't need non-verbal communication.
Of course, some emojis can be used for both verbal and non-verbal communication. But stuff like burger? Or cashier? I don't see the point.
Another thing: this is possibly the worst explanation about concurrency and async/await I've ever read.
Re: Too many emojis in 'Concurrency and async / await' explanation
#16here's the relevant documentation part in context https://fastapi.tiangolo.com/async/#concurrent-burgers who writes this stuff? who writes "your crush [Heart Eyes Emoji]" not just once but over and over, in documentation for a project? could easily just say "your friend [no emoji]"
The surprising part is that they were added in a PR, the original documentation didn't have them: https://github.com/tiangolo/fastapi/commit/741de7f92745d9549...
Re: Too many emojis in 'Concurrency and async / await' explanation
#17An author of an open source project may do what they want, including using emoji in documentation like this. On the flip side, I would never allow that code to be used in any of my projects, nor would I want to work with any contributors that think it is a "good" practice (nevermind "best"). To my mind, this documentation screams "unprofessional". I would be embarrassed to show it to any of my customers. The code is…
That use of emojis gives me a headache, but I (young) do believe that a bit of lightness in otherwise dry topics is extremely important.
What the hell is professionality? Wikipedia says something along the lines of "standards of education and training that prepare members of the profession with the particular knowledge and skills necessary to perform their specific role within that profession".
A (considerate) use of emojis, images and jokes (basically: anything that isn't dry text) can work wonders to make a document more digestible, leading to more effective transfer of information and increased enthusiasm for your brand. I would consider that doing your job quite effectively.
Totally depends on the target audience, of course. I have experienced instances of "over-doing it" before (this is one of them), so I do empathize with the more boring people of the industry a little. But not overly much. "No fun allowed" mentalities can massively hurt morale (remember: this costs money), in my opinion.
Re: Too many emojis in 'Concurrency and async / await' explanation
#18Maybe I'm just an old man yelling at clouds, but I always found the use of emoticons and emoji in official documents extremely off putting. If you want to look hip and cool, at least do so only where appropriate - public-facing technical documentation needs to be articulate and maximally accessible. Not to mention how inconvenient it is to actually add emoji. Chances are that the person who wrote that page didn't dra…
No you're not old, you are just not ridiculously young. :) I agree though, use of emoji outside talking to your friend, to me, is an instant warning of immaturity, and a flag of more to come. The OP post was horrendous to look at, I'm not sure why anyone thought that it would help with understanding the content.
I'm somewhat young (maybe ridiculously so). I'm not a huge fan of emoji and find this page very hard to read (why the hell do you need a pictogram to illustrate a word you just wrote?!), yet I think it's useful for efficient information transfer ("maximal accessibility") for documents to not purely consist of dry, plain walls of text. A few human touches here and there can be effective for navigation within a document through differentiation (not everything looking the same). Emojis in headlines are the easiest way of achieving that.
Re: Too many emojis in 'Concurrency and async / await' explanation
#19Aren't emojis supposed to replace words, kind of like abbreviations? What's the point of having a word and an emoji that mean the same thing right next to each other? I would never write, "want a hamburger :hamburger:?" Instead, I would just write, "want a :hamburger:?" This just seems like the worst of both worlds. EDIT: HN doesn't seem to support emojis. Changed to a markdown like format instead.
The primary purpose of emojies are to add emotion to text that would otherwise be hard to convey, and for that they're useful even in documentation, in moderation.