> Human rights are moral principles or norms that describe certain standards of human behaviour, and are regularly protected as legal rights in national and international law.
I think it would be about as hard to find (or construct) a picture that precisely conveys the concept of human rights as it would be to construct appropriate text to precisely convey the emotional payload of, say, this photo: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/b/b8/Kevin-Carter-....
If we were, for some reason, forced to eliminate all forms of communicating information but one, the most sensible form of communication for us to keep would almost certainly be text. But we aren't, so why would we force ourselves into voluntary communication medium asceticism?
I was watching a TV programme on haiku the other day. One of the things they stressed was that because haiku is so compressed (17 mora in Japanese, where a mora can be though of as either a vowel sound or a consonant followed by a vowel sound in English terms) that you have to be careful of what grammar constructs to use. Grammar does not usually lead to imagery and if you can strip away the grammar, you can have more mora to use for words that evoke imagery.
This made me think that haiku, in particular, is good at evoking emotions and imagery that the reader/listener is already familiar with. There are some incredibly powerful haiku that in just a few words can really tug at your emotions. But you need to have already experienced the imagery for it to have any meaning.
I find that picture to be similar in nature to a haiku. There is very little in the picture itself, but the elements it has evoke powerful emotions because we know what they mean. The starving child, the vulture sitting ready, the question of "why is the child starving" (war)... You assemble these ideas in your head and it generates a huge number of thought processes and feelings.
To me, the difference between such a picture and a haiku is that the picture is not something I have ever seen before. I couldn't imagine it without seeing it first. Someone could write the most poignant haiku about that image, but it would mean nothing to me, who has never seen such a war. But, to the people of that village, I'm sure such a haiku would be incredibly powerful -- possibly even more so than the photograph. They would fill in their own experience in the gaps left by the words. For someone personally familiar with the experience, the photograph might be too real and obvious -- even gauche.
I wonder if text is an ideal mechanism for discussing topics for which the the audience already has some experience -- something to relate to and hang on those words. Pictures, on the other hand, are good for describing things that people have not seen before and may not relate to.
Mindless ideologues are the absolute worst. You've fallen so in love with this ideological position ("always bet on text") that you can't even recognize where it doesn't actually apply. The idea that those five words capture the photo is absurd.
Anyway, I strongly agree. And I think it takes balls to state this opinion because you will be opposed by so many.
I also think the Bourne shell, which accepts good ole text as input (as someone downthread points out), is my most powerful application. Among other things because it is everywhere, it's relatively small, fast, and seems to have an infinite lifetime; it appears forever protected from obsolescence. It's reliable.
Stating this opinion never fails to draw protest. It's just an opinion. Relax.
One time I stated it to what I thought was a sophisticated audience that I was sure could handle it. Somebody still went bananas, claiming that "make" could do everything the shell can do. I must be wrong but at the time I thought "Doesn't make just run the shell?"
There will always be people who are hell bent on arguing against plain text. And the Bourne shell. Why is anyone's guess.
Yet no matter how much internet commentators might complain, I doubt these two things are ever going to disappear. They might get buried beneath 20 layers of abstraction, but they will still be there.
Year after year, they just work. And for that I'm thankful.
"Any one language cannot solve all the problems in the programming world and so it gets to the point where you either keep it simple and reasonably elegant, or you keep adding stuff. If you look at some of the modern desktop applications they have feature creep. They include every bell, knob and whistle you can imagine and finding your way around is impossible. So I decided that the shell had reached its limits within the design constraints that it originally had. I said ‘you know there’s not a whole lot to more I can do and still maintain some consistency and simplicity’. The things that people did to it after that were make it POSIX compliant and no doubt there were other things that have been added over time. But as a scripting language I thought it had reached the limit."
I have to take a moment to thoroughly agree with you on the shell sentiment, although it's not quite on topic. My zsh has always been my most reliable and used tool. Almost every piece of software I've ever used has caused me some headache---GNOME, Firefox, even vim, you name it. zsh never froze, or screwed up my work due to a bug, or anything like that. It always follows what I tell it to do with almost annoying diligence, and if I don't get the result I wanted, I know it's my fault. I've never liked using graphical file managers or, God forbid, some graphical renaming tool, to name an example off the top of my head. I feel immense power when I'm at my shell, because whenever I want to manipulate stuff---from the directory structure, to chaining some commands together to achieve a task, convert audio between formats, getting some quick info out of big files, etc., I always do it using the shell (well, and also the coreutils, sed, awk and others, but I believe my point stands). I know it's a basic thing that all people using Unix systems do and don't think much about it, but the amount of complex things it can do while staying so minimalist sometimes blows my mind. To me, the simple yet powerful text interface feels almost Zen. And although many shells have come and passed, each with its own quirks and weirdness, the underlying principles have barely changed. It's just that perfect. So here's one for the shell: the quiet hero of Unix :)
The Art of Unix Programming dedicates a chapter to the advantages of using text for the input and output of programs: http://www.catb.org/esr/writings/taoup/html/textualitychapte... . They also note that Unix and its derivatives are one of the oldest operating system paradigms still in active use, and that it has migrated to everything from smartphones to supercomputers. In a way, by using a Unix-like OS you are betting on text.
On the other hand, I would argue that engineering, architecture, and industry rely heavily on visual languages such as technical drawings, blueprints, control/process flow diagrams, etc. Text is a good bet, but it's inadequate for a lot of problems related to the physical world that require spatial reasoning.
I think one of the commonalities there is that that kind of pictorial information still shares many of the advantages of text, namely that they are searchable, asynchronous, and permanent.
Speech is often problematic, because it is so ephemeral, unless extra pains are taken to record it. Ideally, you'd have voice recordings or at least good minutes taken of an in-person meeting or telephone call(which actually just turns it back into text...), so that the information doesn't just disappear into fallible meat-memory. The other problem is that it is a real-time communication. You can only consume the content at a single rate - you can't speed through the filler or go back and reread something that didn't at first make sense. With recorded video or audio, you can sort of do this, but it is so slow, compared to reading speed, and it's not like you can just Ctrl-F through it
Additionally, speech is also less coherent than text, unless it's a rehearsed performance. Most people do very fluid re-formulation and editing even when using instant messaging. With speech, backtracking is basically impossible.
There's advances in structured records since then, but text-mode is still important. JSON is somewhere between structured binary and text; Protobufs define a canonical text version and easy tooling to convert to and back. I've debugged a bunch of applications by making RPC calls directly.
On the other hand, I would argue that engineering, architecture, and industry rely heavily on visual languages such as technical drawings, blueprints, control/process flow diagrams, etc. Text is a good bet, but it's inadequate for a lot of problems related to the physical world that require spatial reasoning.
Agreed. Diagrams can of course be expressed as text, but would you rather read SVG XML, or look at the actual diagram?
I disagree. There are countless places where text is probably the least best means. The real issue with text, with ALL text, is that it requires the viewer to be a reader, to have a similar linguistic background to the writer.
If you are writing code or dev notes then text is no doubt the way to go. But if you are trying to communicate with strangers (ie prospective customers) then symbols have their place.
Symbols are very limited and many require even more cultural background similarities than text. You soon run out of simple symbols and end up with ambiguous or meaningless abstractions (what does "three nested red triangles" mean?), lots of icons that look almost alike, or symbols that allude to things based on cultural assumptions, outdated metaphors, or linguistic relations that strangers are equally unlikely to understand.
Pictionary and charades are completely based around the idea that communication without words is more challenging.
Yea, but try charades with a chinese speaker over IRC (or some language without any shared linguistic history)... suddenly charades with hand gestures is easier. The parent comment's point was that it requires a similar linguistic background, you've merely pointed out that abstract symbols aren't universal.
Too many comments are making this a black and white issue. In reality there are going to be some cases where text excels and others where pictures excel. But I suppose that isn't as interesting.
The yellow-diamond example follows American/Australian road signs, where that means "warning" (if it's that consistent?).
In Europe, and much of the rest of the world, an ISO-derived sign would be a black shark in a black-bordered yellow triangle. These are most commonly seen, worldwide, as a lightning bolt on an electricity pole.
The system usees colour and shape to distinguish between warnings (black-bordered yellow triangles), positive orders (blue circles), negative orders (red-bordered white circles) and safety/evacuation (green rectangles).
The Vienna system for traffic signs, used by over half the world, is similar, except warnings are red-bordered triangles.
That, at least, means "no cycling", "cycle path" and "warning: cyclists", or "wear ear protection" and "do not wear ear protection" reuse the same symbol on a different coloured/shaped sign.
Natural language is a great querying tool for quickly combining existing knowledge in order to generate moderately intricate thoughts. It feels easy, but don't forget that it took many lifetimes of experience to accumulate the database you are drawing upon. It's similarly easy to throw together a Smalltalk prototype as it is to have a casual conversation. Not so easy is to construct a language--natural or artificial--from scratch (let alone try to teach it to somebody).
On the other hand, in advanced mathematics, diagrams are used all over the place (look at category theory). When they're not used, the reader is essentially forced to imagine spatially what is being said, often down a blind alley (to use the phrase almost literally).
Diagrams are essential to communicating non-obvious abstract ideas in an efficient manner. In addition, given a domain-specific technical language, there are many possible permutations of words in a sentence, whereas the space of sensibly drawn diagrams is much smaller. Often, after fully comprehending an idea that was previously expressed in words, the final step in congealing the idea in your mind (and convincing yourself of its soundness) is to draw a definitive diagram which covers all the cases, and can be understood in a glance.
I should also mention that many of the worst typographical errors in mathematics completely change the meaning and jumble the thought, something which is far more difficult to do when using a diagram.
Also, as I remarked in my other comment, diagrams complement text, with either one enhancing the other. Neither should completely replace the other.
I agree, diagrams are great -- in their place. But to the author's point, can you draw me a diagram that conveys the same information as the sample sentence from the article:
"Human rights are moral principles or norms that describe certain standards of human behaviour, and are regularly protected as legal rights in national and international law."
I don't think you can, but if you could, it would likely be very large and complex. This speaks to flexibility and information density inherent in text.
The diagram would indeed be enormously complex, because that sentence draws upon a vast amount of existing human knowledge. You'd also have to invent a visual language for describing this knowledge, which at present probably doesn't exist. One may as well try looking at fMRI images of human brains and try to infer the way that sentence triggers existing memories in order to figure out how the brain represents hierarchies of knowledge in memory.
I mostly use diagrams for describing completely new, abstract ideas in engineering or mathematics. Once the idea is understood, then yeah, it's faster to "query the database", and simply utter a word or write down a symbol.
This speaks to flexibility and information density inherent in text
That is true, however, the only reason there is such "information density" is that you already know the meanings of those words, idioms, assumptions, etc. You know a lot of context that isn't being explicitly stated.
That quoted sentence has little meaning to a child or to anyone without a good deal of education and shared cultural background.
When it comes to radio, voice takes a lot more bandwidth than digital signals[1]. This has important practical implications. A typical voice signal takes about 3kHz of bandwidth, whereas a CW (continuous wave, Morse code signal) can be done in about 500Hz. The lower bandwidth lets you pack all of your transmitter power into that tiny little bandwidth, and get your signal out that much further than the same power would give you with voice. Also, when receiving, you can narrow your receiver down to just the tiny little bandwidth window you're looking at, and ignore everything higher and lower, leading to less interference. These are the key reasons why Morse code is still alive and well today.
Other digital modes exist that give you almost the same kinds of benefits as CW for very low bandwidth, most notably PSK31.
[1] Technically, the speed of the signal switching causes you to need more bandwidth. So if you're doing a really fast digital transmission, like a 56k modem, that requires more bandwidth than a 9600 baud modem transmission. This makes intuitive sense. What's kinda surprising though is that even really fast morse code requires more bandwidth that slow morse code.
I agree with the sentiment but not with the arguments put forward. It's just a little ironic that the first example put forward (carvings in a stone tablet) is represented as a jpg image. Even the text of the article itself, considering the point of view of the pixels stored in the graphics buffer, takes just as much space as any other image. Arguably, all text is image, but that's a huge discussion.
Is there really less information required to represent text than data? It just seems easier to encode ascii text because we've settled on an encoding schema that optimizes for the english alphabet. The example of the twitter icon using 2000 bytes is only because the author decided to use a png. Using the font-awesome typeface, the twitter icon is just 2 bytes. And I can whip up in 5 minutes a typeface where the twitter logo uses 1 byte. We can come up with an encoding format where dingbats and logos take up 1 byte and the english alphabet uses 2TB. It'd be a useless encoding for practical purposes, but goes against the idea that text is inherently more informationally compact than images.
I don't think that's a valid argument for informational density. You have to whip up that font where something interesting maps to a low code point and then share it ahead of time before you can take advantage of that alleged density. As an extreme example: if I create a Huffman tree where the bit string "1" maps to the entire concatenated contents of the Library of Congress, does that affect the information density of the Library of Congress?
But I'm not exactly making an argument for information density, except that "it's kinda a weird thing and we probably don't know how to calculate it without assuming a whole lotta things". In my opinion, your extreme example actually supports my argument. Yes, you have to "share it ahead of time", but that's precisely what happened with the ascii encoding. It's just ascii is built into most systems by default and codified by a standards body, whereas our ad-hoc encoding is not.
But does that mean ascii is inherently denser? I wouldn't use ascii to communicate with aliens because to understand it you require knowledge of the majority of the english language (again, english knowledge is shared ahead of time). In fact, the Voyager Golden Record has line drawings on the cover, and not a single character.
It's just a little ironic that the first example put forward (carvings
in a stone tablet) is represented as a jpg image.
But the author clearly states: "If you can use text for something, use it"; this is obviously one of the areas where the author used their discretion and decided to use an image to help illustrate the point.
The author isn't stating "Don't use images", but "Use text wherever it is possible".
EDIT: It seems weird that HN doesn't have a facility to toggle line wrapping in quotes.
When you indent something it is asked that the formatting is important and so retains it. If the formatting is not important, and you don't mind the machine putting in line breaks for you, don't indent.
But as a general form of communication between humans I think visual is powerful. Even illiterates, children understand visual. Expressing complex abstractions in text and understanding it, at present requires a human to undergo about 15 to 20 years of education atleast and that too with some proficiency with the language.
On the computing front, I agree that the text is pervasive, reliable. This brings to me to ask myself that is it because since the text was invented to current education system we are conditioned to prefer text? Computing power for human race non-existent until now to tackle non-text communications at a massive scale and hence text was the natural choice. May be in future we will explore/invent ways to handle visual info same as text (to large extent).
Piping text is great until you want to make something that is robust to edge cases. The various conventions for separating data, and the ways these interact and must be escaped, are a usability disaster. This is why tools like find end up tacking on a million flags and options instead of actually encouraging you to compose simple operations.
The UNIX shell was designed for, and makes sense in, a friendly, collaborative environment. "This breaks for filenames with spaces." "Well then don't do that. If punching yourself in the face hurts, then stop doing it." Feeding malicious input to programs on your own computer is self-destructive, and UNIX's creators felt no need to defend against it. It's "an elegant weapon for a more civilized age."
Nowadays, even trying to read a page of "hyper-text" requires doing battle with several levels of malicious software.
When something better comes along I'll switch away from using the UNIX shell.
But I am not sure I'll live long enough to see that day.
Meanwhile I am too busy using the shell to engage in that battle with hypertext. It could just be my perception, but after years of practice, I think I am winning.
Be careful exporting a changed IFS. That will inherit into child commands, which can cause unexpected breakage. A better model is to simply set IFS in the bash script (without export) or even better, as a one-off prefix to a command
# leaves IFS set for following commands
IFS=$'\n'
$COMMAND
# only sets IFS for one command
IFS=$'\n' $COMMAND
It is common to see saving/restoring IFS to protect against bugs elsewhere from a non-standard IFS:
If you do this, a trap is a better idea to guarantee the restore happens. Better yet, let bash handle that for you automagically by using a local variable.
cmd_with_nonstandard_ifs() {
local IFS='\n'
$COMMAND
}
cmd_with_nonstandard_ifs
# IFS is back to normal here
Also, unless you're using a really ancient version of bash, you shouldn't use backticks for command substitution. Use $() instead.
# backticks need to be escaped when nested
FOO="`basename "\`command_that_outputs_a_path\`"`"
# much easier to read in the modern form
FOO="$(basename "$(command_that_outputs_a_path)")"
The thing is, you probably don't even need mess with IFS - shell globbing handles a lot of these things for you
$ ls -1
a bc
a b c d e
ddd eee
$ for file in * ; do echo "[$file]" ; done
[a bc]
[a b c d e]
[ddd eee]
and arguments be expanded correctly with "$@"
show_args() {
for arg in "$@" ; do
echo "arg that supports spaces: [$arg]"
done
}
show_args "foo bar"
> find | xargs
Of course, this is always a nice option that bypasses the need for bash.
Minor suggestion: "find ." and "find ./" are identical.
All good advice. I was intentionally making a correctness/terseness tradeoff. :)
> ...and arguments be expanded correctly with "$@"
That assumes that your bash is contained within a script, yes? It doesn't work for commands entered directly in a shell?
> ...unless you're using a really ancient version of bash, you shouldn't use backticks for command substitution.
I was -stupidly- unaware that backticks would nest. I always use $() when I want to nest command substitutions.
> "find ." and "find ./" are identical.
Oh, I know. I have the largely unjustifiable habit of always putting a path in a find invocation, as well as always spelling "the current directory" as ./
> > find | xargs
> Of course, this is always a nice option that bypasses the need for bash.
Don't forget -print0 and -0 if you expect to have to handle arguments that contain spaces! ;)
> That assumes that your bash is contained within a script, yes?
Or a function. (that is, anywhere the $1, $2, ... variables are available, as "$@" (must have the double-quotes!) just copies $1, $2, .. without changing the word splitting.
> as well as always spelling "the current directory" as ./
That's actually a very good habit to be in a lot of other commands. It's unnecessary with find, but it's harmless either way.
Not at all. That world existed, for the brief interval between 'only people who have access to a computer are people who devoted their careers to it' and 'everybody who can afford $50 a month has access to the Internet'.
In that time, only a few people had access to computing and network resources, but they were all well-educated, reasonably well-paid and curious, with lots of motivation to help each other out and little motivation to undermine each other. It might have remained just a brief blip of history, except that so many technologies developed during that time, designed with the security assumptions of that time (i.e. practically none), became the fundamental underpinnings of our modern world, like MS-DOS and Unix.
I didn't start using unix/vms systems until the early 90s in college, which was at least a couple years before your "$50/month access to the internet", if we count aol and compuserve, and by that time it was most certainly the case that the era of "[the] only people who have access to a computer are people who devoted their careers to it" was long since passed.
It's amazing how fast you can go from "that guy with the curious hobby" to "some guy that naturally also owns and uses a computer, as everyone else does".
That's why typing a simple textual representation—like S-expressions—would have been even better: so simple that handling it is easy, so powerful that nothing else is needed, but still text.
The more powerful a tool is, the higher the learning curve. When you're designing a tool to have broad appeal, you should try to balance the usefulness of the tool for a variety of use cases against the need of the user to become productive in a relatively short time.
That text can be translated is not an advantage, images can't be translated because they don't need to.
The twitter image is expensive to store but also contains a different kind of information, that would be very hard to convey over text with the same precision and accuracy - how does one describe it pixel by pixel?
I could go on - I agree with the idea but text is only king when text is the best tool, or you have the mind to fill the gaps (like in a novel) and you don't mind variance between readers, or the data is high structure but low resolution like concepts. Images are high resolution and it's important to recall them exactly, with perfect accuracy, thus they require a lot of information. Plus I'm not sure the best storage was used for that icon.
Text also compresses very well, so it must not be quite the densest.
Like I said, I could go on.
In my opinion formulas aren't text. Yes you could read them out loud but that way they would be harder to understand than looking at the formula. Try understanding maths really written down in text without formulas.
It's also wrong to speak about text being the oldest communication technology when it developed from pictograms.
I think the author intended that both formulas and pictograms are forms of text. They're both made up of abstract symbols that can be composed to create meaning.
Right, but "plain text" is just a one dimensional stream of symbols. A mathematical formula is a two dimensional arrangement of symbols - there's a degree of additional complexity there which moves it from 'text' closer to 'diagram'.
A scatter plot is just abstract symbols creating meaning, too - but it's clearly not just text.
This is true, but please, please don't make the mistake of confusing 'text' with 'ascii'.
For example, yes, text is searchable - but remember that different human languages consider different symbols as 'equivalent' for search and so you need to take care matching the searched string to the text.
And while humans can readily encode information into text, extracting that meaning again unambiguously enough for a computer to use is hard. Parsing is one of the foundational techniques in computer science, and natural language processing is still on the frontiers of development. Meanwhile, we're still dealing with Excel spreadsheets that pop up a red flag and ask a human for help whenever they see what looks like a number stored as text.
So yes, bet on text, but don't assume that because text is fundamental that it is simple.
"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:"
in my browser I see a little broken image icon which represents a missing picture. How apt.
People are noting counterexamples where pictures are more efficient, such as warning symbols which are resilient to cultural translation. However, I would argue that such cases are actually forms of text. By 'text', the author really means collections of symbols. In that sense, ancient hieroglyphics are texts and perhaps emojis are too.
I think that stretches the definition a little too far. A warning sign of that type is different from textual symbols in that it's readily understandable to someone seeing it for the first time. I agree with the author's thesis in general but that is a rather good exception to point out.
You raise an interesting point. Perhaps we shouldn't stipulate that a symbol must be understood the first time - the meaning of most symbols are probably taught in some way - but rather that once learned, the meaning is unambiguous. The silhouette of a shark on a beach sign is quite unambiguous, whereas an artist's illustration of a shark may be open to interpretation. In other words, perhaps it is the level of ambiguity which distinguishes symbols from other graphic forms.
Text are just symbols and symbols are an even older and more stable form of communication.
If I use text to make a sign, only people who can read the language will understand it. But if I use a well known symbol, everybody will understand it.
symbols are about as flexable as text- If you have a symbol as a sun, I might interpret that as heat, light, the sun, a god, or anything really. Depending on the area you are from. Knowning a language ensures that when you say X you mean X.
And while symbols CAN be used for discussion, could this conversation be relayed in symbols?
If they come up with something more efficient and information dense, I'd be happy to see it, but until we get direct brain/digital connections, I don't see it happening.
I think it would be about as hard to find (or construct) a picture that precisely conveys the concept of human rights as it would be to construct appropriate text to precisely convey the emotional payload of, say, this photo: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/b/b8/Kevin-Carter-....
If we were, for some reason, forced to eliminate all forms of communicating information but one, the most sensible form of communication for us to keep would almost certainly be text. But we aren't, so why would we force ourselves into voluntary communication medium asceticism?