I agree about text being absolute
I TOTALLY disagree on terminal being the best way
Even the text tablet shown is using 2D surface in its full ability - we need to strive to bring that as well
Always bet on text (2014)
51–60 of 187 posts
Re: Always bet on text (2014)
#52I have mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, I agree: text is infinitely versatile, indexable, durable, etc. But, after discovering Bret Victor's work[1], and thinking about how I learned piano, I've also started to see a lot of the limitations of text. When I learned piano, I always had a live feedback loop: play a note, and hear how it sounds, and every week I had a teacher coach me. This is a completely diff…
I mean, this very discussion is a case study in the supremacy of text. I skimmed the OP's blog post in thirty seconds and absorbed his key ideas. Your link is to a 54 minute video on an interesting topic which I unfortunately don't have time to watch. While I have no doubt that there are interesting ideas in it, video's inferior to text for communicating ideas efficiently, so most people reading this thread will never learn those ideas.
Text is certainly not the best at all things and I especially get the idea that in pedagogy you might want other things in a feedback loop. The strength of text however is its versatility, especially in an age where text transformers are going through a renaissance. I think 90%+ of the time you want to default to text, use text as your source of truth, and then other mediums can be brought into play (perhaps as things you transform your text into) as the circumstances warrant.
Re: Always bet on text (2014)
#53gnabgib points out that this same article has been posted for comment here three other times since it was written. That said, afaict no one has commented any of these times on what I'm about to say, so hopefully this will be new.
I'm a linguist, and I've worked in endangered languages and in minority languages (many of which will some day become endangered, in the sense of not having native speakers). The advantage of plain text (Unicode) formats for documenting such languages (as opposed to binary formats like Word used to be, or databases, or even PDFs) is that text formats are the only thing that will stanmd the test of time. The article by Steven Bird and Gary Simons "Seven Dimensions of Portability for Language Documentation and Description" was the seminal paper on this topic, published in 2002. I've given later conference talks on the topic, pointing out that we can still read grammars of Greek and Latin (and Sanskrit) written thousands of years ago. And while the group I led published our grammars in paper form via PDF, we wrote and archived them as XML documents, which (along with JSON) are probably as reproducible a structured format as you can get. I'm hoping that 2000 years from now, someone will find these documents both readable and valuable.
There is of course no replacement for some binary format when it comes to audio.
(By "binary" format I mean file formats that are not sequential and readily interpretable, whereas text files are interpretable once you know the encoding.)
Re: Always bet on text (2014)
#54Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think the downside, at least near-term, or maybe challenge would be the better word, is that anything richer than text requires a lot more engineering to make it useful. B♭ is text. Most of the applications on your computer, including but not limited to your browser, know how to render B♭ and C♯, and your brain does the rest. Bret Victor's work involves a ton of really challenging heavy lifting. You walk away from…
> B♭ is text. Yes, but musical notation is far superior to text for conveying the information needed to play a song.
Yes. And I create and manage the musical notation for over 100 songs in text, specifically Lilypond.
Re: Always bet on text (2014)
#55Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think the downside, at least near-term, or maybe challenge would be the better word, is that anything richer than text requires a lot more engineering to make it useful. B♭ is text. Most of the applications on your computer, including but not limited to your browser, know how to render B♭ and C♯, and your brain does the rest. Bret Victor's work involves a ton of really challenging heavy lifting. You walk away from…
> B♭ is text. Yes, but musical notation is far superior to text for conveying the information needed to play a song.
I don't understand, musical notation is text though so how can it be superior to itself?
Re: Always bet on text (2014)
#56I disagree. If your goal involves the cooperation of others one should always bet on lazy.
Text will win, unless there is a lower effort option. The lower effort option does not need to be better, just easier.
Re: Always bet on text (2014)
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
> B♭ is text. Yes, but musical notation is far superior to text for conveying the information needed to play a song.
I don't understand, musical notation is text though so how can it be superior to itself?
I think they mean staff notation, not a textual notation like "B♭".
Re: Always bet on text (2014)
#58I have mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, I agree: text is infinitely versatile, indexable, durable, etc. But, after discovering Bret Victor's work[1], and thinking about how I learned piano, I've also started to see a lot of the limitations of text. When I learned piano, I always had a live feedback loop: play a note, and hear how it sounds, and every week I had a teacher coach me. This is a completely diff…
Thank you so much for introducing me to this talk. Changed my way of thinking.
Re: Always bet on text (2014)
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't understand, musical notation is text though so how can it be superior to itself?
I think they mean staff notation, not a textual notation like "B♭".
Although, one could make the argument that staff notation is itself a form of text, albeit one with a different notation than a single stream of Unicode symbols. Certainly, without musical notation, a lot of music is lost (although, one can argue that musical notation is not able to adequately preserve some aspects of musical performance which is part of why when European composers tried to adopt jazz idioms into their compositions in the early twentieth century working from sheet music, they missed the whole concept of swing which is essential to jazz).
Re: Always bet on text (2014)
#60Much as I love text for communication, it's worth knowing that "28% of US adults scored at or below Level 1, 29% at Level 2, and 44% at Level 3 or above" - Literacy in the United States: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literacy_in_the_United_States
Anything below 3 is considered "partially illiterate".
I've been thinking about this a lot recently, as someone who cares about technical communication and making technical topics accessible to more people.
Maybe wannabe educators like myself should spend more time making content for TikTok or YouTube!