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Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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…
Except nobody really reads text anymore. If you want to deliver a powerful message pics and vids have the most bang for the byte.
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…
Emojis evolved from simple text like ":)" or ":/". And for the new set of emojis, half the time I am not sure what the sentiment is being expressed!
Sure, having a code point in your character set that represents a bird[1] makes sense but I really hate that font designers now have control over the way I get to express my emotions and how others perceive them.
[0]: Sure, ":)" and ":/" also depend on the font but much less.
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)
I've seen some people pick up this medium very quickly, and others struggle for months with little progress. However, almost anyone can pickup Sketch or Illustrator for creating UI prototypes very quickly.
The expressiveness of text is not always a strength. It's very hard to build programming languages without text, but I strongly believe we still program too much when building UIs. Excel demonstrates that people can quickly pickup a minimal programming language for connecting data to UI, I think an Excel-Sketch hybrid is where the future lies for building applications in particular.
> 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.
The only upside of graphical languages is that because of their limited capabilities, they focus on only one abstraction layer and that allows you to visualize that layer quite cleanly.
You can't program anything more sophisticated or step outside of the only abstracrion layer you are allowed to program in. Eg. you can't write your custom for loops by dragging and dropping boxes and you also cannot orchestrate dags or box diagrams using dragging other boxes around.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Emojis evolved from simple text like ":)" or ":/". And for the new set of emojis, half the time I am not sure what the sentiment is being expressed!
Add to that that, depending on the emoji font, the emoji will look completely different[0]. So as the sender you have no guarantee that the recipient of your message will actually interpret your emoji as you intended. It really is beyond me why the Unicode consortium thought that putting emojis in a character set would be a good idea. Sure, having a code point in your character set that represents a bird[1] makes sen…
> 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.
Not nowhere. Labview is/was pretty successful. But not generally successful, no.