
Always bet on text - walrus
http://graydon2.dreamwidth.org/193447.html
======
ajuc
People can read much faster than they can speak, and they can google a new
words.

You can Ctrl+F arbitraly big text files for keywords. Good luck with doing the
same with 2-hours-long video file or mp3. You will need to listen to the whole
thing. That's what annoys me about the new trend to do tutorials as video.

You can easily diff text.

Text works with version control systems.

Text works with unix command line tools.

You can trivialy paste relevant fragments on wiki pages, in emails or IM
discussions.

Google translate works with text.

Screen readers work with text.

~~~
narag
OK, there are so many advantages of text. I wholeheartedly agree and prefer
plain text over most "smart" formats.

BUT.

I have this pet idea about source code. Text isn't the optimal format because
a program _is_ not a lineal thing, but closer to a tree structure.

Why have we settled on programs written in text? Pretty much for all the
reasons you wrote and the fact that we've had bad experiences with other kind
of formats in the past. Being able to fall back to plain text when things go
wrong is very nice.

But it has its own sort of usability problems. There's an _impedance mismatch_
between text and programs and sometimes it shows. Actually we don't see it
more often because we tend to think that text is the way it is done, always
was done and always will be done.

~~~
gumby
>Text isn't the optimal format because a program is not a lineal thing, but
closer to a tree structure.

I can tell you what it's like from experience. The Interlisp D environment
used a structure editor rather than a text editor. I found it infuriating and
clumsy. Admittedly I had come from the emacs-infused PDP-10/Maclisp & Lispm
world, so I gave it several months, but in the end I adapted an Emacs someone
else had started and did all my editing in that.

I figure if this would work for any language it would be Lisp, and it didn't
work for me. It sounds like a great idea, since if the editor's "buffer
structure" _is_ the program structure it's easy to write lambda functions to,
say, support refactoring your code. But it was rarely convenient.

The other thing that didn't work for me was that it was of course a mouse-
driven interface (this was PARC after all) and I found shifting my hand off
the keyboard all the time slowed me down a lot too.

~~~
narag
_I found it infuriating and clumsy._

I've heard about programs that tried to do that before that had massive
usability problems. Your comment seems to confirm that diagnostic.

 _I figure if this would work for any language it would be Lisp_

I guess it would be more of a novelty for _other_ languages.

 _I found shifting my hand off the keyboard..._

That's a big no-no!

EDIT: By the way, I've been experiencing something similar recently, teaching
Scratch and AppInventor to my son and a group of children at Coder-Dojo:

[http://medialab-prado.es/article/coderdojo](http://medialab-
prado.es/article/coderdojo)

Kids like the mouse interface, but I do find it very limiting and slightly
infuriating.

------
GuiA
I agree that text is undervalued in our current media happy era; I say this as
someone who uses terminal applications as much as possible (email, twitter,
accounting, programming, etc. - I secretly pray for a return of the text only
internet)

On the other hand, there are things that pictures can convey in ways that
plain text couldn't approximate.

To link to a famous example:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Minard.png](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Minard.png)

Just looking at this, in half a minute or so, you get a pretty good idea of
the quantities involved, how they evolved over time, how they are linked
together, etc. Conveying the same information with pure text would be much
more lengthy.

I'm not going to make an entire case for this right here - just read Edward
Tufte's books if you aren't too familiar with those ideas.

~~~
velik_m
I agree, the wikipedia example is especially strained, sure you can not
represent that sentence clearly in picture, but can you represent Mona Lisa or
Beethoven's 5th in text? Different types of representations are used for
different things, sometimes they overlap and one is more efficient than the
other and yes text has been pretty useful.

~~~
ajuc
> can you represent Mona Lisa or Beethoven's 5th in text

It was first created in text :)

~~~
chongli
How many people could fully experience Beethoven's 5th by reading the sheet
music, assuming they've never heard it before?

~~~
rthomas6
For musically gifted people who read sheet music every day, I have heard that
they start to hear scores in their head while reading them, and that it's not
so different than reading words. So in the case of classical music, the
comparison to text is quite applicable. Shakespeare is almost unintelligible
to me until I see it performed. I see no difference between this and a
textually encoded symphony.

------
kerkeslager
> 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: <Twitter Logo
> Here>.

My reaction when reading this was, "Yeah, but that's because you encoded it in
PNG. That's a 'good-enough' encoding, but you can definitely make it more
efficient by making it an SVG, since that image is of the kind that's ideal
for vector graphics." And then I remembered SVG is a text-based image format.

Touché, frog hop. Touché.

Adding to the point: karma system on sites such as Reddit has incentivized
converting text into images, because text posts don't get karma. For example,
r/quotesporn[1] (safe for work) has many more users and quotes than
r/quotes[2] which allows only text.

As a collector of quotes, this annoys me to no end, because I can't copy/paste
the quotes into my personal quotes collection.

[1] [http://reddit.com/r/quotesporn](http://reddit.com/r/quotesporn) (safe for
work)

[2] [http://reddit.com/r/quotes](http://reddit.com/r/quotes)

~~~
kps

      > As a collector of quotes, this annoys me to no end, because
      > I can't copy/paste the quotes into my personal quotes collection.
    

I haven't used it myself, but you might find
[http://projectnaptha.com/](http://projectnaptha.com/) interesting — it's in-
browser OCR of text in images.

~~~
undergroundhero
I used the Chrome extension for a few months and the OCR was never very
accurate. Even giant, clear block letters were often not recognized.

~~~
TylerJay
It always worked pretty well for me. It just got annoying to have on all the
time.

------
Detrus
Doug Engelbart of Mother of All Demos fame talked a lot about artifacts. Books
are an artifact of paper and text. WISIWYG is an artifact of print media.

The technology of the medium determines the best way to convey information
through it. And on top of that, whatever people are used to may influence what
they do in a newer medium. For example we write to imitate speech. We use
books on screens and try to recreate the world of print with WISIWYG design
tools.

Text may be an evolutionary winner so far, but it is by no means some ideal
artifact for communicating when computers are widespread.

~~~
mkesper
Text may be an evolutionary winner so far, but it is by no means some ideal
artifact for communicating when computers are widespread.

Which is...right now.

~~~
Detrus
Yes. There are few serious attempts to come up with better artifacts because
we're so used to existing ones.

And another point of Doug is we're too lazy to learn complex new artifacts.
Reading and writing takes a while but it's worth it. If someone comes up with
a better idea that needs time to master it will be a hard road ahead, people
like short learning curves when dealing with computers.

~~~
mercer
On a small scale I do think we have been developing new ways of expressing and
communicating though. Smileys to me are a good example of this, but you can
even include the 'x is typing a message' and 'read at <time>'.

While there is no universal consensus on what exactly this kind of
'information' means, within specific groups (and ages) they can convey a lot.

I've been chatting since I was fifteen or so, and to me and many people I chat
with, a particular smiley, or the 'is typing' message can have a lot of
meaning. I even find myself actively 'manipulating' this information at times:
I might intentional start and stop typing at times as an analogue to the face-
to-face act of saying 'hmm', looking away thoughtfully and not answering
immediately.

I suspect all this meaning encoded in non-text things (practically speaking)
is even more common among younger people.

------
Daishiman
Yes, and this carries over _very well_ when talking about code and programs.

Whenever I hear about the stories of the potential of graphical programming
languages, "live" code environments living in their own VM, and graph-based
logic stuff, the first thing that comes to mind is how come those systems have
such a short shelf-life even when some of the concepts behind them are so
brilliant.

Between the increased storage space, the interoperability issues, and the
exponential difficulty in dealing with non-text media in a variety of
operations, there's so much more additional friction to these systems that in
the end they're not worth it. Unless, of course, they can be trivially
converted to plaintext and parsed as such, then they have a fighting chance.

------
ukoms
Every letter, number or any sign is a "picture". In fact every written text is
in fact structured array of simplified pictures, which happens to be
understandable under conditions of given language rules. What should be bet is
information. It doesn't really matter what communication tool will be used -
information is the creme de la creme. Think about this - I can write simple
text: "Mother should love their childrens". Would you still bet on text, if i
wrote this in different language? "Każda matka powinna kochać swoje dzieci" or
"Kila mama lazima kuwapenda watoto wao" isn't as understandable by most of
people, despite the fact letter I used are almost identical. And how about
other characters? "יעדער מוטער זאָל ליבע זייער קינדער" or
"すべての母親が子どもを愛する必要があります" (thanks google translate ;))? In the end what matter
is not text itself, but message behind it.

~~~
ajuc
> Would you still bet on text, if i wrote this in different language? "Każda
> matka powinna kochać swoje dzieci"

I happen to understand that, and if I haven't I would just google translate
it.

Now, if you made a video saying that and I couldn't understand you - no such
luck.

Text is the only medium for which we have reliable operations working on
semantic level.

~~~
squeaky-clean
The parent post even used google translate to generate some of those
sentences. You can't do that with video/audio.

You could enter the sentence into google translate, have it attempt to
synthesize a pronunciation, and then you verbally mimic it to the best of your
abilities. But now, not only are you compounding the inaccuracies of google
translate, plus the inaccuracies of the speech synthesizer, plus the
inaccuracies of your own pronunciation, which means the viewer has no reliable
way to return to the original source material. But the entire process is still
reliant on text at one point.

------
ap22213
I was just telling my wife the other day about how much I'd hoped that text
went away in favor of better communication mediums.

I feel shy to admit it, especially here, but I dislike text. I dislike it
because it's unnatural. I view it as a hack that was adopted to help
communicate ideas through time and space. It's a cool hack, but still
unnatural. It requires huge amounts of training to participate, and it has
other issues.

I dislike it at a more fundamental level because it tends to leave ideas 'set
in stone'. Text, like architecture, seems to have an unnatural tendency to
remain unmodified through time and space. It creates dogma and worship and
takes up the space where new structures could have potentially formed. It
creates things like the bible and the constitution - things that morph from
their original intent into an unbreakable form of reverence. Since it
disconnects the 'bodies' of the reader and the author, the reader has a
tendency to mistake the text as something different from the author and his
ideas.

Text has a place - to store the facts of the world at a given time and place,
certainly. To store ideas that can be accurately represented with discrete
symbology. To transmit the ephemeral. But, I truly hope that we abandon text
as a 'serious' medium for ideas in favor of video, audio, simulation, and
virtual reality.

Many of us have a bias toward text because that has been how we have lived our
lives, through its symbols. Text has altered our brains. But, imagine that you
could relive your life without it, with other forms of communication, would
you still want it?

~~~
chongli
Text is the only good form of asynchronous communication we have in our daily
lives. Without it, we'd all be recording voicemail for one another constantly.
Who the hell wants to do that? Not to mention the fact that making audio
recordings is much harder to do discreetly and impossible to do in many noisy
or strict environs.

And seriously, what is natural? How is human architecture any less natural
than a beehive or a beaver dam?

~~~
ap22213
Natural is adapting to change, understanding that the environmental context is
always changing. Architecture is usually built to last forever, but it always
has to be torn down, at great expense. Or, the expense is too great, and it
remains, an archaic eye-sore.

I text message as much as anyone. But, I think we all know that text messages
are ephemeral. I've edited (ironically) to make that more clear.

~~~
TeMPOraL
> _Architecture is usually built to last forever, but it always has to be torn
> down, at great expense. Or, the expense is too great, and it remains, an
> archaic eye-sore._

Just like beehives, beaver dams and ant hills.

> _But, I think we all know that text messages are ephemeral_

Much less than sound or vision.

To make vision, sound, touch, etc. good as foundations for information
exchange, you'd have to give more control to the receiving party. Make the
medium skimmable and searchable.

------
Ygg2
I did some research on textual vs graphical representation for my master.
According to that research (not on my comp so I can't reference it) - one of
main advantages of text is a near universal set of symbols (like Ascii for
images), more constrained relationships (images are 2D while text is
essentially 1D).

~~~
Tsukiko
Most of text is 2D. What is usually regarded as text is just a collection of
simplified and arranged 2D symbols. What is usually regarded as a picture is
collection of unarranged non-simplified 2D symbols. 1D text would be more like
morse code.

~~~
Ygg2
I didn't meant as a visual reprentation. Text no matter how well
formatted/displayed will only flow in one direction* (be it up-down/down-up
and left-to-right/right-to-left). In a picture you have no such constraints.
Thus a picture is harder to scan by humans and machines alike. It takes expert
knowledge to tune out some of distractions of visual representation.

* Exception being texts that are deformed to instill a sense of confusion and to simply play with how text looks like. Or possibly some really obscure non-European writing system that writes non-linearly.

------
pdkl95
Early in science education is the very important lesson that you _always_
write units for your answers, as they are _more important_ than any numerical
value you happened to get. The best teacher I ever had liked to use an example
of a simple cake recipe: "2, 8, 9, 2.5" tells you nothing, while "flour,
butter, eggs, sugar" is something you could _experiment_ with to find the
specific values. The text units (labels) convey far more information.

I propose that this is one of the key reasons why text files are vastly
superior to binary formats. While they end up very similar in _normal_ use,
the readability enables investigation and experimentation, while writing a raw
struct out to a file keeps the meaning in the (possibly lost or unobtainable)
original program files.

// if speed is needed, you can always cache the parsed version of the text
file

------
wuliwong
I don't understand the purpose of this post.

"Text wins by a mile." Wins what?

"Text is everything." I don't get his point.

The opening of this post has the feel more of a fan blog about their favorite
baseball team than something intellectually serious.

In the second paragraph the author says "text is the most powerful, useful,
effective communication technology ever, period." I suppose this is the
purpose of this post? I guess if he is saying if he could only have one form
of communication, he would choose text (removing speech from the list). I
guess, but is this actually a debate? Are there really different "camps" that
prefer images over text or video, etc?

I could delve into the arguments presented in the article but I think first I
need to understand the thesis.

EDIT: To the down-voter, do you have anything to ask or say? Or are you just
down-voting because you disagree? Everyone is interpreting this article to
mean "there is too heavy a bias towards multimedia on the web today" but this
is not the thesis of this article as I see it. The author is making arguments
that text is better than multimedia in an absolute/complete sense. This is an
entirely different argument.

------
analog31
A couple more points about text:

1) In addition to being searchable, text lends itself to other forms of
automated processing such as translation and text-to-speech for the vision
impaired.

2) I'm prone to debilitating eyestrain headaches when I try to do any kind of
graphical work on a computer, yet I can write text without looking at the
screen.

~~~
dummyfellow
isn't it very temporary advantage, till couple of decade back text wasn't
searchable, and in couple of decades images may be equally searchable. Also
pictures commonly have universal meanings.

~~~
klez
> Also pictures commonly have universal meanings

Not really. Here's a common example

[http://theblitzbit.com/wp-
content/uploads/2012/09/swastika.j...](http://theblitzbit.com/wp-
content/uploads/2012/09/swastika.jpg)

This pictures means different things in different cultures.

Something else
[http://www.ritex.it/images/20111116_A.jpg](http://www.ritex.it/images/20111116_A.jpg)
Try asking a Chinese farmer what this is.

~~~
aestra
Try asking an American what this picture means -

[http://www.slate.com/content/dam/slate/archive/2010/03/1_123...](http://www.slate.com/content/dam/slate/archive/2010/03/1_123125_2245632_2246167_2247195_100308_signs_exit_greentn.jpg)

Most people would know that means "exit" but in true American fashion the
United States uses a different sign - [http://www.oneskilladay.com/wp-
content/uploads/2013/05/Exit-...](http://www.oneskilladay.com/wp-
content/uploads/2013/05/Exit-sign.jpg)

I gotta say it took me a long time abroad to figure out what the green running
man sign meant.

------
gear54rus
I tend to agree. Yet human thoughts are presented in the form of pictures
(dreams? you don't really see text in front of you when dreaming).

It's one thing that a computer cannot make sense of 4000 bytes of a tweeting
bird, but human brain instantly recognizes the rendered sign.

Also, videos and music are very hard to describe in text: it just does not
have this unique feel video or music piece does.

~~~
tjradcliffe
Videos described in text are called "stories".

Imagine a technology that can create a present experience in the user's brain
that engages all the senses and evokes a dream-like state of being there...
that technology is called "text" (that's a loose paraphrase of someone in the
interactive fiction community, though I can't remember who.)

Music, I will grant you (mostly), but text really is an unbelievably powerful,
flexible medium. It can't do everything, and everything it can do requires a
certain amount of work on the reader's part and a huge amount of work on the
writer's.

The remarkable thing about text is it allows us to tame and control our
dreams. We don't dream in text, but we can use text to evoke waking dreams. We
can be in Mirkwood or on the slopes of Mount Doom in a way that mere video
can't compare with.

~~~
dijit
How do you search a video anyway? assuming there was no text medium.

~~~
blisse
Pattern matching the audio wave or video bitmap frame-by-frame.

------
VLM
No discussion of labor? You guys are missing a major part of the argument.

Looking at OPs article, if my purpose is to explain human rights, text is
staggeringly more efficient in labor of creation, not just time spent
interpreting it or storing it or searching it.

An artists life work might produce a painting that conveys the entire meaning
of the definition from the article of human rights. Maybe. I bet that would be
an amazing painting and I'd enjoy viewing it. But ... aside from high art, can
we afford general commerce in an artistic style? Is it affordable for society
to create an interpretive dance implementation of my mortgage statement and is
that a wise use of limited artistic skill and labor?

Its possible to create deeply meaningful works of art, at staggering expense
of materials and labor both creation and interpretation and storage and
archiving. That doesn't mean that most human creations (my water bill, the
instructions for my TV, the receipt Amazon included with my $4 HDMI cable) are
worthy of artistic labor.

If a graphics artist or painter is any good, I don't want that artist to waste
time on my electric bill, I'd much rather have the fruits of their labor
hanging on a wall in a frame. If they're not any good, I don't want them
screwing up my electric bill making it incomprehensible.

------
antonyme
Not only is text durable, but plain text data is universal.

Take a document written in the word processor du jour 20 years ago. It is
highly unlikely you could mount the physical media, let alone import the data
with high fidelity. But plain text can be read by just about any tool, whereas
binary/proprietary formats are limited by the longevity of the
hardware/software that created them.

~~~
boomlinde
"Universal" is a strong word for data adhering to an arbitary standard that
has only existed for a tiny fraction of human history.

As for not being able to mount physical media, how is that problem not exactly
the same regardless of the text encoding?

~~~
XorNot
Indeed - ASCII is not "universal". It's just common.

Hand someone who's no knowledge of ASCII some ASCII bytes, and no compliant
editors, and see how hard it is to figure out they're dealing with the English
alphabet.

ASCII mostly benefits from being a single-byte format - if a tool parses
ASCII, then it's very easy for humans to go "right, that's English" looking at
the output.

But this would be just as true if we had tools which handled Unicode (and most
editors do exactly that now). Or it we had some other type of common binary
standard which also encoded units.

It's all about the metadata - which isn't necessarily always in-band.

~~~
marssaxman
It wouldn't be that hard. You can think of ASCII as a simple substitution
cipher - practically a Caesar cipher, really - and simple frequency analysis
makes cracking such a thing literally child's play. It might take a bit longer
if the data were presented as a bitstream, and you had to work out what the
char length was, but even that wouldn't be too hard as there's a lot of
repetitive structure in ASCII bits.

------
bluerobotcat
'Always bet on text' is a catchy slogan, but the author fails to define
'text'. This is confusing because the post contains a lot of pictures of
things that I don't know we would all agree are text.

Let's start with a radical position. Is something text iff it can be directly
encoded in UTF-8? What, then, about symbols that have not yet made there way
into Unicode? Like an i dotted with a heart. Does it become text when the
Unicode Consortium says so?

Nowadays memes tend to be distributed as (animated) bitmaps. But if we wanted
to, we could encode them more efficiently. So are they text?

If 'text' = Unicode then that would also mean that many mathematical
expressions (matrices, fractions) are not text. Math texts before symbols were
not very readable:
[http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/brainiac/2014/06/bef...](http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/brainiac/2014/06/before_symbols.html)

ASCII-encoded math is not without problems either.

Does 'text' include semantic markup like 'emphasis', 'heading', or 'list-
item'? Does it include visual markup like 'italic', 'underline', 'blue', or
'Times New Roman'?

Does 'text' include newline and tab characters? Is it correct to say that
newlines and tab characters exist on paper? If they don't then why do we use
them to indent blocks of code?

If a sheet of paper with scribblings can be text, then can a bitmap be text
too?

Now that I've brought up mathematics, HTML, and code, should we think of text
as a linear medium or is it better to think of texts as trees?

What about handritten class notes that include arrows that link together
different text fragments? Are these arrows part of the text? Does that mean
that texts are directed graphs?

I'm even wondering if the author might actually have meant 'always bet on
language', although that seems kind of obvious.

Or perhaps he meant 'don't needlessly throw away information', which is what
would be happening if your CMS served pages as HTML image maps.

That is to say, even if we're all inclined to say that text is awesome, which
we probably are, we might still be saying quite different things.

~~~
Tsukiko
Alphabets are just symbols that have some sort of meaning to you. Alphabets in
a row are text. There are symbols that have no meaning to you but still are te
xt such as Kanji or Korean alphabet for some people yet you consider them
text. Unicode has nothing to do with what is considered text. Humans have for
millenia used pictures as symbols that are used for text, in egypt for
example.

~~~
bluerobotcat
Note that Unicode includes hieroglyphs:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egyptian_hieroglyphs#Unicode](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egyptian_hieroglyphs#Unicode)

~~~
edmoffo
Not just hieroglyphs... Unicode includes anything you can imagine

~~~
bluerobotcat
It includes many things, but not, for example, an 'i' dotted with a heart. And
to represent mathematics well you need to use MathML.

~~~
Someone
There was a request for it:
[http://www.evertype.com/standards/iso10646/pdf/n258a-heartdo...](http://www.evertype.com/standards/iso10646/pdf/n258a-heartdot.pdf)
(but do note the date)

------
malandrew
Text also has a history and toolset that is hundreds (printing presses with
moveable type) to thousands of years old (writing systems usable with some
sort of scribe tool to mark clay tablets or draw on papyrus scrolls). The
ability to quickly communicate in images is remarkably new relative to all
that. In the renaissance you had three proper types of intaglio processes
(drypoint, engraving, etching), but novel ideas required someone to create new
printing blocks from scratch in a laborious process, especially relative to
moveable type. Only since the advent of GUI computing systems have we had
tools that make it easy to effectively communicate with images (CAD, vector
and bitmap drawing apps, image manipulation apps, video editing). These tools
are still very much in the realm of professionals, but tablets have done a lot
to democratize the ability for laymen to use them to communicate. Furthermore,
memes now form a basic form of communication, which you can see through reddit
and hipchat integration.

In 100 years, what the average person will be able to communicate quickly with
images is likely to be unimaginable to us today.

Anyways, I'm not saying text isn't superior in many ways, just that its way to
early to judge images given technical limitations.

I think writing systems like the Chinese writing system is instructive in this
respect. It had roots from thousands of years ago, like western writing
systems, and both were about as effective until the end of the 19th century
with the linotype machine and the mid to late 20th century with 7, 9, 14 and
16 segment liquid crystal displays. Western writing systems enjoyed a big
advantage from a technical perspective until only recently because they were
simple enough in form to be conveyed by simpler technologies than the Chinese
writing system.

If such a gulf can exist, even if only for a few decades, between two "text"
systems, then it's not a stretch to see image-based systems as comparable, but
requiring better technology to become a powerful as text in the sense that
Graydon is talking about here.

------
gokhan
If Chinese can be read faster (I don't know), than it's the picture that
matters. Here, try to represent this picture in text:

[http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/b/b8/Kevin-
Carter-C...](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/b/b8/Kevin-Carter-Child-
Vulture-Sudan.jpg)

It's 28K, a full text definition might be smaller but will be hardly accurate.
My brain can process this single picture faster than a possible text
representation of it.

Text is more practical 99% of the time but it's actually small pictures, known
as letters, used together to symbolize concepts. I don't think my brain
interprets letters individually, but my eyes mostly catch word by word, hence
a picture.

~~~
andrey-p
> I don't think my brain interprets letters individually, but my eyes mostly
> catch word by word, hence a picture.

That's a normal thing. You read words based on their outline rather than
individual letters, what with the bits that stick upwards (ascenders) and
downwards (descenders). Which is why ALL CAPS TEXT IS A LOT HARDER TO READ
QUICKLY, and why if you jmuble some lettres in a few wrods you can still read
them with relative ease.

So the way humans read text is still kind of image based - you match a word
based on a preexisting idea of what they should look like. It's just they're
coincidentally easy to read by computers, too.

~~~
gamman
To expand on that perspective, words signify small, almost atomic, concepts
which are relatively easy to learn - optimal elements with which to express
less universal and more complex concepts. Each word can be viewed as a
shorthand to a already previously defined expression.

In that context, letters would be to words what pixels are to bitmaps.

Make words more complex (also longer) and the set of those elements will be
able to encompass a wider, more versatile set of "elementary" concepts (akin
to a wide tree structure), but this will also be harder to learn within a
reasonable amount of time. In case of pixels this is comparable to higher bit-
depth.

Yes, nobody knows the full vocabulary of any natural language, but we still
understand each other due to knowing a common subset of words, having
redundancy within and between sentences passages etc.

Make words less complex and they will encompass a narrower set of concepts,
but the whole set of them are easier to learn. You will usually have to use
more of them to express concepts (deeper tree structure) though. Similarily,
one would need to use a larger amount of pixels with low bit-depth to express
intermediate colors.

This is comparable to having well named functions in program code - partition
the program into functions well enough and you will have created a set of
relatively universal concepts, which the another person might understand
without delving too much into the body of the implementing function each time.

Similar relationships can be perceived on the word-sentence and sentence-
paragraph level, of course. Therefore the difference between pictures and text
has more to do with partitioning information between abstraction levels than
with some fundamental difference.

The optimal way of partitioning data varies depending on content.

For example, concepts of left and right are inherently connected with our
visual and spacial perception of the world and are therefore better expressed
by invoking our spacial recognition (a two dimensional image). That is because
definitions for these atomic concepts are practically hardwired and require no
learning.

Therefore, finding the best way to express information for humans and
computers alike is akin to finding the optimal point between two extremes of
reduced set of simple concepts and a larger set of complex concepts, that are
easy enough to parse by both.

In the case of humans, the physical medium will always most likely be eyes for
read mode due to built-in parallel processing and high bandwidth, and a subset
of our muscles (currently fingers) for write mode. I'm not sure how fast can
we successfully parse audio signals, and brain-to-computer interfaces are
still too slow.

As for the partitioning of information - who knows? Physically we have colors,
brightness, shapes, sounds, temperature, touch, and more at our disposal. But
the best way depends on our brain, and what size of information units it is
best equipped to process.

And that is definitely not 8 bytes.

------
Derbasti
I am actually somewhat worried about the longevity of our current tools. When
we die, what will happen to our digital photos, and writings? Will our
children find our diary in our home directory like they do when it sits on the
bedside table? Will they look at our wedding pictures like they do when they
find old photo albums? Will they remember our PhD thesis when it was never
printed, but only ever a pdf?

Quite possibly, we might end up a forgotten generation, since procedures for
cataloging digital memorabilia will only be invented after the lessons learned
from the deaths of the first digital natives. One can only hope that
archive.org will at least have an ugly copy of our blog.

~~~
doomlaser
The Library of Congress is archiving all of twitter as well, at least.

------
AnonJ
Text existed before the proliferation of other media probably because it was
primitive and inferior. Chimpanzees lived for eternity before human beings
appeared. I don't see anything great in that. We didn't use a lot of
multimedia in the beginning, primarily because of tech limits. Now that the
conditions are ripe, why not? If everybody is using more and more of it, it's
for a reason. Apple and MS brought about a revolution, exactly because they
unlocked the killer feature that was the GUI. Ask if many of us would like to
go back to the 80s regarding computer UI, that would be a nightmare. I
certainly feel a 2-min video overview of product features is tons better than
an one-hour read. Images and in general sensory feelings are always much more
natural to human beings, which in essence are still a kind of animal. Texts
were invented to maintain civilizations and enforce social hierarchies, but it
was never ever _natural_ nor great in this matter.

The Twitter icon takes a lot of space in a digital form, yet it only takes one
minute to draw by hand, while the author probably wrote for an hour.

In all it's just a pointless, childish and tunnel-sighted rant. "Bet" on text?
Bet what? I'm quite amused by the number of upvotes here. Though gladly I see
many sane counterarguments high up there also, which is quite reassuring :)

------
RivieraKid
Not sure what the fuss is about. Sometimes text is optimal, other times
images, video or something else is more suitable. I don't really understand
the point of this article.

------
xg15
Please describe an average Git commit graph as text in a way that you can
actually draw some insight from it. And no, ASCII art doesn't count.

~~~
pdkl95
Project FOO, Chapter 5, Verse 18-27 (King Linus Version)

And 171b25e, after one hundred sixty and two log entries begat fe961ca. And
171b25e continued as a tagged branch after it begat fe961ca while the author
made eight hundred more log entries, and begat further experimental feature
branches. And when the number of log entries wase nine hundred sixty and two,
171b25e's branch was closed.

After fe961ca was sixty and five years log entries, and was known as e56b8bd,
who begat 882b79d. And e56b8bd was rebased to the project root after it begat
882b79d.

And 882b79d preceded a hundred eighty and seven log entries and was then known
as b6ff3ed, and begat 99e395a. And b6ff3ed continued after it begat 99e395a
for seven hundred eighty and two log entries and begat many experimental
feature branches.

And the current HEAD of the house of proj/foo.git is still 99e395a.

\--

Joke aside, _technically_ that problem has been solved before.

For a serious answer, "git log" should be very durable, and if you want a nice
graph with it, something like this has benefits of both text and graphs:

    
    
        git log --graph --pretty=format:'%h -%d %s (%cr) <%an>' --abbrev-commit --date=relative

------
jokoon
People can read text and understand it. Computers need parsers. Parsers are
hard to write, and the time needed to parse one text will be just
proportionate to the length of the text. Parsing can't be parallelized.

I'm sure the browser industry could benefit from a open, compiled html format,
it would be so fast. I still wonder why there is no such format.

It's not about filesize though, gzip does a really great job at compressing
text, but it's just about making a page load faster. It's no surprise to see
web browser use so much memory: html is very flexible (there's nothing
better), but it's fat.

That is a problem somewhat similar to the RISC vs x86. Risc has a simpler set
of instructions, is a faster processor, but executables are much much bigger,
requiring more cache. x86 has a more complex set of instructions, so it's
slower, but the executables are much smaller. It's a balance to find.

I wonder if you could extend battery life by using compiled html. I would love
to test that kind of tech on "normal" cellphones and see if how it performs.

~~~
jeffpetes
> I'm sure the browser industry could benefit from a open, compiled html
> format, it would be so fast. I still wonder why there is no such format.

Has anybody even tried making one and it just hasn't been adopted or is this a
new idea?

~~~
jokoon
Microsoft already has the .chm format, so there might be a patent, but I'm no
expert. I don't really know how their format works though. It might be
compiled as in "obfuscated".

But I don't think there's any existing, open format like that. Plain text html
has the advantage of being easily diagnosed and immediatly readable, but you
could easily make a binary format decompilable. I guess most programmers
prefer having plain text because it's right before their eyes, it also sort of
is "open", but that's not what open source really means.

It's not a new idea, but when I think about it, compiled html is a good
solution to speed up web browsers. Now the .CHM format is not what you would
want, as it's more targeted towards documentation, and is not extensible with
CSS like html is now. It's an abandoned format I guess. Lighter than PDF I
think.

By the way, when I say compiled HTML, I mean a binary version of a webpage
that is already parsed. Would be a tree structured file. The goal is to remove
the parsing phase.

But indeed, that could be a good opportunity for big tech firms to push that
format. As long as it's open it might be a big success.

------
brockers
There are 20 year old binary formats that we cannot recover because we have
lost their decoders. There are 4000 year old texts we have been able to
decipher because text is so many orders of magnitude easier to decode. There
are anthropologists who argue that it wasn't tools or speech that led humanity
out of caves, but writing (and the abstract thought that is facilitates.)

~~~
DennisP
How would I find those anthropologists' arguments? Sounds interesting. (I
majored in anthropology, a long time ago.)

------
vph
If done properly, multimedia can convey information that text cannot possibly
do. Text just lack the dimensions that multimedia have. An example includes
the RSA Animate series, which take really good books written by really good
authors and condensed that into very informative 5-minute videos.

------
PhasmaFelis
I liked the article, but in retrospect I'm not clear what it's arguing
against. What are the technologies that people have promoted to the author but
are trumped by text? I feel like there's an interesting story there.

~~~
Daishiman
Specifically, non-textual representations of code.

------
Chirael
I know there are reasons for it, but I'm still sad to read that HTTP/2 will
use a binary format instead of text :(
[http://http2.github.io/faq/](http://http2.github.io/faq/)

~~~
Istof
maybe because binary is the lowest level format of text

------
damian2000
I don't get the point of this to be honest ... things that can be stored as
text generally are, those that aren't, e.g. videos, photos, sound files, can't
be represented by text - they're media.

~~~
dredmorbius
You're new around here, aren't you?

Ironically enough, I'm trying to make a webpage more readable (just for my own
damned use), and was stymied on this page:

[http://www.inscc.utah.edu/~tgarrett/Garrett.html](http://www.inscc.utah.edu/~tgarrett/Garrett.html)

By the fact that the "Education ... Positions ... Activities" elements _are a
fucking image_.

[http://www.inscc.utah.edu/~tgarrett/Garrett_files/shapeimage...](http://www.inscc.utah.edu/~tgarrett/Garrett_files/shapeimage_2.png)

Note that the color selection means that this is almost completely unreadable
on either a dark or a light background.

Actually, a deep red does fairly OK: rgb(192, 0, 0)

------
ThomPete
Although it's certainly true text is powerful, text is also a reduction of
reality.

There is a whole universe of things phenomena text it's sub-optimal for.
Experiences being one of them.

------
netcan
_text is the most powerful, useful, effective communication technology_

True, and very interesting to consider.

OTOH, if you can simulate a person who knows how to express themselves
speaking to you personally, there's and even technology you tap into. That's a
technology _we_ have actually adapted to biologically.

Everything else is just hijacking faculties designed to allow your uncle to
explain to you how to make rope from bark.

------
elliotec
This is a great argument for text over icons in design. I wonder if in 250
years people will still know what the 3 bars (hamburger?) icon did.

~~~
dredmorbius
I've got no idea what it does _now_. Other than that sometimes useful things
are under it, sometimes not.

~~~
aestra
Me too, kinda. I mean I eventually (through trial and error) noticed it
brought up a menu, but god that's not in any way obvious at first. It is funny
because until I read something about it I didn't even know what it was
supposed to represent.

Apparently its an old icon but I never really saw it (that I can recall) until
mobile got popular.

I had a teacher in high school who thought the "graph" icon in Microsoft Word
was "library books." She called it the "library books button." I guess 3 lines
isn't enough information to convey meaning. Even though the button meant "put
this information in graph form" she didn't see that the icon represented a bar
graph.

------
duaneb
I would like to point out that cave art far predates any substantial 'text' we
might have. Even if just as a shape to form a glyph, images are by far the
most powerful method of human communication—no language is at all necessary.
Language can add power, but at such a cost (learning a language takes years).

------
xioxox
Text is great, but graphs and diagrams are often better for representing
certain kinds of information or relationships. When I read a scientific paper,
the figures are often what I look at first after the title, sometimes even
before the abstract.

------
huhrly
I'm disappointed the author has illustrated their article.

------
Istof
"Text is the oldest and most stable communication technology [...]"

I don't really know but text is probably not the oldest...

------
joeheyming
This is why scripting/interpreted languages are vastly faster to produce than
compiled programming languages.

------
tempodox
That's why Unix uses text, and not some binary form, for most data exchange.

------
chj
The vast information in DNA is also represented in "text", sort of.

------
Chris_Newton
There are plenty of advantages to text formats, to be sure. Others have
mentioned many already, so I won’t repeat them. But let’s also consider both
the disadvantages and how many of the advantages are “accidental” rather than
inherent benefits of using a textual format.

One disadvantage of text is its lack of expressive power. Try reading the
equation shown in the article aloud. Now try giving a one hour lecture on
advanced quantum mechanics without the aid of mathematical notation. We can
often represent information far more concisely and accurately with a good
notation than with text alone, particularly when there is some inherent
underlying structure that goes beyond what we can conveniently represent with
some linear sequence of a tiny set of symbols. Computers are good at that kind
of thing, but we don’t read Shakespeare in binary, and we certainly don’t draw
the Twitter icon from the article using nothing but 1s and 0s.

Another disadvantage of text is how much it relies on everyone to use the same
conventions, even though in the real world they don’t. Go just about anywhere
in the world and you can recognise what the little pictures of a man and a
women on the two doors in the restaurant mean. Replace them with ‘M’ and ‘F’
and you’ll see people who don’t speak English waiting outside to see who comes
out of which door. We use different languages. We use different alphabets. In
technology, we use different encodings for glyphs and invent all kinds of
other concepts in an attempt to standardise how we represent written text, and
we _still_ create numerous bugs and portability issues and lost-in-translation
problems. We’ve been using computers for half a century and change, and we
still haven’t standardised what the end of a line looks like. Or was it the
end of a paragraph?

Now, certainly the simplicity of a text format has big advantages today in
terms of things like searching for data and programmatic manipulation. But how
much of that is just convention and historical accident? Right now, I’m typing
this using an input device heavily optimised for text, because that’s what my
computer comes with. If I want to input some graphical notation, say an
equation, my choices are probably limited to using some awkward purely textual
representation (TeX notation, etc.) or some even more awkward half-text, half-
mouse graphical user interface. Neither is an appealing choice, which is why
it takes those of us working in mathematical disciplines forever to type up a
simple note or paper today.

Technology does exist that can interpret a much wider range of symbols drawn
with a stylus or other pointing device as an alternative means of input, but
usually as a niche tool or a demonstration of a concept. Until we routinely
build user interfaces that parse freeform input and readily turn it into
whatever graphical notation was intended, a lot of us are still going to reach
for a pencil and paper whenever we want to draw some quick diagram to explain
an idea. But I bet a lot of us still do draw that diagram instead of speaking
for another five minutes to try to explain it.

Personally, I’m looking forward to the day when source control _doesn’t_ show
me a bunch of crude text-based edits to my code, but instead a concise,
accurate representation of what I actually changed from a semantic point of
view. But to do that sort of thing, we have to have more semantic information
available in the first place, instead of relying on simplistic and sometimes
error-prone textual approximations.

~~~
jodrellblank
_Technology does exist that can interpret a much wider range of symbols drawn
with a stylus or other pointing device as an alternative means of input, but
usually as a niche tool._

Handwriting math equations is built into Windows 7 and 8. Over half a billion
computers potentially have access to it.

[http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows7/use-math-
input-p...](http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows7/use-math-input-panel-
to-write-and-correct-math-equations)

~~~
Chris_Newton
That’s a great example of what I mean. The intent is laudable. For now, the
tool is far too limited/flawed for professional work, but one day maybe our
input/output devices will be kinder to this kind of interaction and our
software will routinely support alternative forms of input to work with data
that isn’t purely textual.

I think a more polished example that is available today is the use of stylus
and graphics tablet with drawing software. That is a relatively mature field
where the use of alternative input methods to keyboard+mouse is well
established, and skilled users already do some amazing things.

------
bnjs
Some stuff is good for stuff. Other stuff is good for other stuff. :)

------
0xdeadbeefbabe
Text is just small pictures, so always bet on small pictures.

------
sanxiyn
This is why Snapchat is a chat, in addition to being a snap.

------
adnam
And then there's XML...

------
cLeEOGPw
I guess I'll have to drop Blender and use text files to create 3D models,
because some guy on the internet thinks that text is "the most powerful,
useful, effective communication technology ever, period".

If the point of the article was to trick people into clicking, then it
succeeded in that I guess.

~~~
bliker
Maybe you should try [http://www.openscad.org/](http://www.openscad.org/)

------
anilshanbhag
The arguments presented are highly biased. Text is great but images conveying
the same meaning are always better. Why ? We can grasp the same information
when conveyed via image. Say you are conveying an idea to someone or speaking
to a conference - you always try to minimize text and use graphics to
illustrate concepts as people tend to understand faster that way.

~~~
PhasmaFelis
> _Text is great but images conveying the same meaning are always better._

This is clearly false, and makes me think you didn't read the article, since
the article provides a counterexample right near the beginning; try to express
this in an image: "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."

Of course nobody's proposing we abandon images; they're indispensable for many
things, like the conference slides you mention. But if I had to do a
presentation and was _forced_ to choose between only text and only non-text
images, I think the best choice would be clear.

~~~
tjradcliffe
Slightly off topic but that's a terrible definition of human rights (and being
in nice crisp text makes this immediately apparent).

A far better one is, "Human rights are political conditions necessary of the
life of a morally autonomous being." Tyranny and democracy are both "political
conditions", as is "the rule of law" and various other things. One useful
thing about this definition is that under it rights are both natural and
inalienable: a right may be violated (a condition may not be met) but the
necessity of certain political conditions for moral beings to be able to make
their own moral choices (moral autonomy) cannot be removed.

So not only does text enable us to present ideas more succinctly and precisely
than images, it allows us to _argue about them_ effectively, and to have those
arguments remain somewhat accessible for thousands of years. Images can be
used as components of an argument (I've never published a scientific paper
without graphs) but without the accompanying text the argument is woefully
incomplete, whereas text alone is capable of sustaining a vast range of
arguments without any accompanying images.

------
Tsukiko
Fuck Hacker News. The comment system here sucks camel's ass.

After 5 comments I couldn't post for -1.5- 3 hours. That's fucking retarded.
And your fucking emotional downvote shit. Worst fucking site for discussion
ever.

I thought I could come back but after being involved in more free communities
this site feels like a fucking prison where you get beaten and put in a
quarantine cell for saying nigger or jew or fucking anything that might offend
someone's fucking ass.

Fuck you Fapper Jews.

~~~
Tsukiko
Can't handle the truth it seems. Thanks for the downvotes.

