> 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>
Author is really excited about really old information technology. He makes some good points.
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.
Nearly every language will be processed as an AST, not as text.
Text is just a serialisation format for the AST. For some reason we still insist on editing the serialisation format instead of the actual data representation.
I agree, but it makes me sad that we've come to see XML as primarily tech for serialization of component models, service payloads, and configs; that is, all the things that XML should not be used for. When actually SGML from which it's derived is all about text editing and using minimal markup to create implicit textual hierarchy.
The funny thing about XML is that it was explicitly conceived to solve problems of representing, translating and transmitting component models and configuration.
The sad thing is that it was abused, horribly, in the early naughts when people tried to take it too far. On the one hand it was rushed out without the proper tooling and you had humans typing raw xml without the right amount of support from intelligent autocomplete coming from schema-aware editors. On the other, you had systems that tried to force XML into roles that are better suited for a programming language (I'm looking at you, ANT). And worst of all, it became the centerpiece of a bunch of tech that people really hated-- remember all that crazy WS-* shit, and "SOAP" (which could have stood for "Complex Object Access Protocol". All this wasn't the "fault" of XML which, IMHO, has rock-solid core concepts. XML got an undeserved bad rep from association to the failure of the things it was used with.
XML still survives, though. The tooling is good. If you type XAML or HTML in the right editors, it's serves the purpose competently and without drama. People aren't going crazy finding new XML based applications anymore. It's just doing it's job. I prefer pure XML for config files even now-- of course I never expect users to see it or type it. XML, at the end of the day, is intended to be manipulated by tools.
I wish I could say the same for yaml and to some extent json. I feel like these things are about to be abused like XML was.
> XML still survives, though. The tooling is good. If you type XAML or HTML in the right editors, it's serves the purpose competently and without drama.
HTML isn't XML, though XML was inspired by HTML and HTML has an XML serialization.
IIRC, some or all of the versions of XAML aren't, strictly, XML either, merely XML-derivedl0
No. HTML used to be "an application" of SGML. Meaning HTML brings a profile for SGML features (formerly, an SGML declaration determining things such as allowing tag inference and other minimization) plus a DTD grammar. Though HTML has also quirks for script/style elements, and URLs.
OTOH, XML, like SGML, is a markup meta-language and a proper subset of SGML (also with a fixed SGML declaration disallowing tag inference and almost all other minimization features). XML was introduced by W3C (the SGML "extended review board") as the markup meta-language for new vocabularies on the web going forward around 1997 to eventually replace HTML. While that hasn't happened, SVG and MathML have been specified using XML.
Because graphical programming are just textual programming languages which are just overly complex (xml) and coming with attached visualization engine for its components. They are used only for limited domains such as composing some data flows or video node editors, etc. because visualization of anything more sophisticated would make one's head explode. You could just as well visualize components of AST of Python for very little benefit.
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.
They are super popular in game development. The most popular one is Unreal Engine's "Blueprint". Unity does not include visual scripting, but there are popular plugins on Asset Store, the biggest one is PlayMaker. Unity Technologies themselves plan to release their own, in-engine visual programming tool this year.
Apart from that, visual programming is commonly used for shader programming, video compositing and AI/animations scripting [1].
I am a programmer and like many of my peers I cannot stand those systems, but designers and artists love them. They are widely used everywhere from small indie games up to AAA releases, not only for simple logic but for modelling complex behaviours and flow controls too.
> I am a programmer and like many of my peers I cannot stand those systems
I am also a programmer but I love my graphical shader editor in Octane [0]! It's the perfect interface for defining a graphical data flow. For example, I can implement really complex spatial conditionals by creating a merge node controlled by a greyscale bitmap. E.g. to create a gold thread on a silk material, I can merge existing gold and silk shaders through a bitmap of a lace pattern, itself edited in Photoshop. Just by connecting some nodes.
If you think graphical programming languages are nowhere, that just means you do not have a very broad exposure to programming.
As was already pointed out, graphical languages are massive in game design. They are also used in audio processing, in scientific and engineering software through labView, and in various other places.
They are very popular in fields where we want to open up programming to more people than those who call themselves "programmers".
Graphical programming languages are fairly popular for “scripting” and signal processing in various domains like visual effects, sound design, game dev, etc.
Sure you wouldn’t want to implement the underlying systems in them, but I do think they have their place and are often undervalued by developers.
Text based programming is inherently 1d, so isn't well suited for the highly parallelised computing we have today. 2d programming would make much more sense.
The issues with graphical languages arethings like being much harder diff/merge and version control generally, being dependent on IDEs, and severely limited by mouse usage. I don't see any of those issues as being impossible to overcome, but instead graphical programming is held back by always being implemented as a DSL with no attempt to meet the requirements of a general purpose language.
I think there are three reasons why non-textual programming is constricted to a few domains, and is not widespread as general-purpose:
- As you point out, all the tooling around programming like editors, exchange formats, version control, debuggers etc. are only available for text, rendering everything else generally unusable.
- There are many failed attempts, with many still being textual in the end, only with over-the-top syntax highlighting, such as Scratch. These attempts have paved the way of non-textual programming with gravestones, making the field look like a graveyard, so nobody wants to get into it anymore. Scratch might still have its place in education as an gentle introduction to the concepts of programming, but no software developer is seriously going to use it for any big project.
- People are used to text and they will reject other approaches instinctively. You can read many statements in this discussion here like: "Graphical programming would make your head explode", which I think is similar to how people where afraid of using trains in the early days: "Driving to fast will kill you" and "Nobody can survive such speeds". It might take a whole new generation of programmers to accept anything non-textual as intuitive (which is why it could become popular with artists and designers I think).
I despise videos when I want to learn something. Give me a nice text (+ pictures if a subject requires it) so I can follow at my own pace: slow down, skip or skim as needed.
Yeah, it definitely depends for me too, but getting the nuances right from a video wouldn't work for me at all, even in a thing like dancing. Live instructor is an entirely different proposition (you can choose to focus on the bits that you care about, move around to get a better view, etc.). And I can stop them and ask for them to repeat, slow down or split their movement into more granular "part-steps".
Videos are simply not that for me. Perhaps with actual 3D videos and improved tooling we might get there (eg. ability to zoom in on an instructor's hips in "infinite" resolution if you are having trouble following that particular bit of their motion).
And I mean, you can sure learn from a video, but I just find it harder. Eg. I can go look at dance or basketball moves and try to reconstruct them, but it's usually a couple of core points that need to be taken in to achieve them that are much easier to grasp when broken into fundamentals.
However, videos where the gist of the work is on the student, vs on the instructor, are much easier to make, which I believe is part of their popularity!
Nobody? You're not reading Hacker News posts and comments? Nobody is purchasing books anymore? There's no more blog posts or news articles? Writers no longer have jobs? Is that why GRR Martin can't finish Winds of Winter?
I would like to add that text, as a thousand-years-old-technology, has always included illustration too. Even in recent/digital text, you have this bird that doesn't take 4k bytes: [edit: unfortunately hackernews doesn't display the unicode character U+1F426]
Text is very powerful, but it doesn't need to always work by itself (arguably works best together with other media)
While I totally agree with the OP, the point to remember is that text is a really terse storage as long as you have the Unicode mapping already stored to transform the binary compressed form to actual pictures of text (vs abstract forms or numeric codepoints when simply stored as "textual" bytes).
This does not diminish the value and expressiveness of text, but it needs to be said that in 5000 years time we'll need both the Unicode specification and those 2-4000 bytes to decipher the author's post.
It's just a cost of digital media.
The bigger issue is how do we ensure digital media perseveres for so long.
I dont think you would. If english is still understood, decoding ascii/utf-8 is trivial. Just think of it as a ceaser shift cipher with an offset of 64. Very trivial to decode with frequency analysis if you know its english. Either you understand that 65 represents the abstract concept A, or you have no idea what the letter A is. Either way, a picture of the letter A is not going to be helpful.
Having english still understood after 5000 years seems much harder. But hey, latin is pretty old and we still understand that.
> in 5000 years time we'll need both the Unicode specification and those 2-4000 bytes to decipher the author's post.
Nitpick: In all likelihood, an English dictionary would be enough. Even if the Unicode spec is lost, the text can probably be deciphered by using frequency analysis plus the dictionary to associate codepoints with characters.
Sure, but the English dictionary is a bit longer than the Unicode spec :)
My point was that there is a lot of implied data that undermines this "compression" of information into "simply bytes" today: I am pointing out the implicit in OP's assumption.
Maybe I did not choose the right addendum, but a pretty comprehensive addendum is needed (in all likelihood, an "ancient English dictionary" is needed anyways).
They weren't obnoxious, just subscribed to a more restricted interpretation of "text" than yourself, and to which many people seem to agree.
It's clearly a continuum from 3D objects, to pictures, to icons and ideographs, to highly abstract sings representing words and ultimately sounds. That fact that some designer of character sets decided to put the limit somewhere and include a bird icon and not an Obama icon does not invalidate other interpretations.
By the way, there is a thing called Emojicon where a character for 'Albert Einstein' was proposed as valid 'text'.
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)
It hopefully doesn't affect your opinion on his take, but it hopefully gives some context related to his background. He's got a bunch of experience in very low-level very back-end systems, involving a lot of abstract reasoning. I would guess people used to a lot of abstract reasoning would tend to be partial to plain text and/or mathematical notation.
Cool, that's a very interesting observation, so thanks for elaborating!
As originally worded, it only sounded like "hey, this dude is famous" (for HN value of famous :-), so I would appreciate the commentary you just shared right off the bat! Thanks again for the clarification!
Yes, there's a reason why the command line and shells are still a thing. Text supports a wider range of expression than any other medium we've developed thus far (and not for lack of trying!). Even Steve Jobs in his never-ending quest for UX minimalism couldn't eradicate the keyboard from the iPhone, despite all their UI innovations.
Text is also why XML, JSON, and Markdown are a thing.
When you can accomplish your tasks within a constrained range of expressivity, you do that (gas & break pedals, steering wheel, door handles, etc). But when you need greater expressivity, you're probably going to need text.
Also where does text end and diagrams/images start?
E.g where does musical notation stand? For an untrained eye it is just a bunch of lines, dots and squiggles but others will read it like text and much more efficiently so than if it were written words.
Similarly the example about the Wikipedia text of human rights being supposedly impossible to convey via image. But what does the text convey to you if you don’t speak English?
Hieroglyph writers have to resort to tricks like punning to express ideas that are not simple pictures. There's a reason why written language became more abstract.
> Also where does text end and diagrams/images start?
Text is the written form of language. And language is defined as a sequence of symbols. Thus, text is a subset of diagrams. Arbitrary diagrams can be of any topology (e.g. DAGs or even have cycles), however text always is of sequential topology (or a hierarchy as there is an isomorphic mapping to sequences).
Basically, if there is a canonical way of reading it out loud, then it has an explicit sequence and is thus text.
By that rule it follows that:
Musical notation is text as it is strictly sequential (in time) and maybe hierarchical if there are multiple tracks. Most mathematical notations are text, as they are also sequential, even matrices are only a hierarchy of sequences which in turn can be serialized. Chemical / molecular diagrams are not text, they can contain cycles. Same goes for electronic and logic circuit schematics or rail way diagrams found in public transportation.
> Similarly the example about the Wikipedia text of human rights being supposedly impossible to convey via image
Schematics and diagrams are only use full if / because they are subject to a certain defined visual vocabulary. So if you had a visual vocabulary in that domain then you could express them as a diagram.
On the other, other hand. I find text far superior for creating and editing technical diagrams and images. Give my graphviz over any GUI editor to do the same.
In this case the diagrams are good for communication but terrible for expression, I think this distinction is being overlooked by many here.
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 leans to data.
This is an exaggeration, life is almost always a grey area - but I hope you get my point.
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 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.
I'm reminded of a story I heard where someone responded to news of a death in the family with what they took to be a crying face, but what the recipients took to be a crying laughing face.
The thing is, with emojis the differences introduced by font designers can be very subtle. In the GP's case, the laughing emoji seemed so much out of place and violated social protocol so heavily that I assume the confusion was probably cleared up later on.
But what about cases where a font designer changes, say, an emoji face with a light, content smile to a shy smile? This has the chance to undermine the entire emotional content of a message, without sender and recipient ever noticing.
For a more concrete example, have a look at https://emojipedia.org/beaming-face-with-smiling-eyes/ . Is it just me who thinks that the glyphs by Apple and WhatsApp show a beaming face with a somewhat sly touch whereas most others simply display happiness?
> It really is beyond me why the Unicode consortium thought that putting emojis in a character set would be a good idea.
iirc some japanese character sets already had them (introduced by telecoms for text messaging?), so originally they were included for compatibility [i.e. to fulfill Unicode's goal of being able to encode everything]. then people discovered the emoji keyboard on iphones and it got popular
> why the Unicode consortium thought that putting emojis in a character set would be a good idea.
That puts blame on the wrong organisation. The consortium is to the most part only standardising existing character repertoires. Emojis were popularised by a mobile phone equipment manufacturer as a marketing stunt. http://enwp.org/Emoji#History
Emoji are modern hieroglyphs. It's just an additional means of conveying meaning.
> font designers now have control over the way I get to express my emotions
This could have been a major issue, but media platforms recognized it and have provided their own pictograms for years, mostly compatible with each other.
They have a valid point, however. What is now widely considered to be a "water gun" emoji started out as an actual gun, but Apple decided at one point that they were going to be "progressive" and changed it to a water gun. To me, this upends the entire idea of emoji having a stable definition.
Words don't have stable definitions either. My point was that there is nothing special about emojis any more than there is about Chinese characters or Egyptian hieroglyphs.
Sure, but in the case of words, both sender and recipient at least agree about the content of the message, even if their interpretation is different.
In the case of emojis, both the sender's and the recipient's software agree on the message content but the actual persons no longer do because the content is suddenly being displayed very differently.
It's fascinating to me that they did this with the pistol, but :knife:, :bomb:, :dagger:, :crossed_swords:, :bow_and_arrow:, et al all look as threatening as ever.
But those weapons don't have the same highly political negative associations as guns do. Knives are tools more than weapons; bombs can kill a lot of people (see the 2013 Boston Marathon attack or IEDs in Afghanistan), but their typical stylization is also very cartoonish and there isn't an NRA for bombs; swords are archaic and mostly shown as medieval or pirate weapons; and bows and arrows as weapons are also archaic, and they're only used today for hunting.
Even back when I started, around the ascendency of the WWW when Usenet was still ABigThing™ (though after the start of the Eternal September, I'm not quite that long in the tooth!) there was already confusion with the simple text smilies.
Ignoring the arguments of whether to include the nose (the original form was :-) which I much prefer) on the basic examples, people introduced new combinations faster than I cared to pay attention to so knowing what they meant was not always easy.
It ended up that there were whole dictionary like lists of them in some Usenet groups' FAQ documents.
As soon as you have more than a few of any symbolic representation (text smilies, emoji, gifs/memes[†], ...), it becomes dynamic grammar in its own right and away from the core few it is a mess of people not understanding what you mean either because they don't get your reference or you have used a reference incorrectly (or, if incorrectly is the wrong term, in a manner differing significantly from its common use).
[†] it is less of an issue with meme images/animations as they usually have a text portion making them far less ambiguous, but the issue is still there overall
That’s part of the fun of emojis. It’s also a counterpoint to the original post. There is a lot of information in a pictorial emoji, so much so that it can be bent and reimagined to many contexts.
Additionally, before emojis, we were saying things like :shrug: in IMs and we conveyed the same thing. It was a specific variation of text, which I still imagine emojis to be. I don't think the shrug emoji is more efficient at conveying sentiment than :shrug:
According to my understanding a medium is a mean of communication, thus including text. OTOH it seams from your message that these are two complementary objects. Is my understanding correct?
> media is more efficient at transmitting sentiment
I don't agree with that. A photo doesn't contain much information about the emotional state of the photographer, unlike a few lines in a diary. My travel diaries are much richer in sentiment than my travel photos.
To me, emojis are a form of data compression. Common concepts are compressed into symbols: happy, sad, car, eggplant with 3 drops. Emojis are macros. That works as long as you exchange common concepts ("I feel sick"), but it falls flat if you need to venture beyond that ("My back is itchy"). You couldn't write a country's constitution with emojis. At least you shouldn't.
Likewise, a picture only shows what's visible. Travel photos don't capture the smell, the temperature, or how you feel after staying up all night with a sick stomach. A few words in a diary will.
“Text is efficient at transmitting data. If I want to describe a concept or an event, text is king.”
Really? Why are video games so visual, in that case? To update you on the situation your character is in, inform you where the enemies are, give you feedback on your current health and objectives... most video games use a rich graphical system of colors and symbols overlaid over a high resolution image of the game world...
If text is more efficient at communicating ‘events’, why aren’t there ‘action text adventures’?
Because games are optimized for immersion and being roughly analogous to reality, not for efficiency of describing events. That would be the purpose of a news article. Pictures are included, but text is the focus.
There are action text adventure games, even massively multiplayer ones.
I probably have blown more time on text MUDs than all other computer gaming combined, but even back when I used to play things like counterstrike I spent an inordinate amount of time using text to chat with team mates or in the console binding and triggering macros.
If we agree that a picture is worth 1000 words, then...
Given the current state of information technology, I agree that we are most efficient at processing text. However, that can change pretty quickly. Storage mechanisms similar to DNA can make the difference between text and multimedia irrelevant. It will happen because nature already does that.
I am talking about efficient use of available space. A terabyte may store a lot of pictures, but if we can achieve the data density of DNA, we may be able to process (store, transmit, transform...) far more amount of data far more quickly. Then text vs multimedia will become irrelevant.
I do agree text wins when it comes to expressiveness. However, that expressiveness comes at a cost, just look how difficult it is for beginners to grasp the initial concepts of programming.
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.
Actually a single letter is "a picture". So Text is a collection of small pictures. There is no such thing as "Text"- we give a meaning. Otherwise it is bunch of weird arrows and curves - pictures.
There is no such thing as pictures. It’s just photons that bounce off or are emitted by certain surfaces that fall on our eyes and are then transmitted as electric impulses to our brains which trigger synapses....it’s all just stuff firing in our brains.
It’s pretty obvious what the author of the article means by picture and texts. I don’t think there’s anyone who is not trying to be deliberately obtuse who would have a hard time figuring out what they mean by pictures and text here.
But my intention was question validity of series of claims the author making using full loaded abstract words - " Text is everything" " text is the most powerful, useful, effective communication" . Of course the author should expect to be challenged on meaning of words.
Let's say you looking at some painting painted by a person who wanted "paint" the emotion inside his brain. Not sure you can completely paint the emotions as picture. But author claims is text can completely express the painting or the emotion - that is not true. Can someone write words to describe me - how lemon taste? And I get same feeling on my tongue after reading "text" ?
A letter is not a picture, at least not in the way we generally talk about pictures – it can be graphically manipulated and re-imagined in almost limitless ways and degrees and still perform its function. For most things-that-we-call-pictures, if you even made a relatively small adjustment to it, it would be a different picture.
That really depends on your language system. What you say is true for alphabetic systems, but quite different for logographic (e.g. Chinese) or pictographic systems.
I don't think they're different enough to refute my point. You see Chinese characters in a great variety of typographic and handwritten styles, all able to be read by fluent people.
Think about character recognition software. The point is to take a picture, and map it to a discrete value. The pictures that correspond to "a", for example, have a lot of variation. But the point of writing is to remove the ambiguity inherent in drawing something, and map it to one of a small set of discrete values.
So even before binary encoding systems, or even the printing press, text was a technology for conveying information with less ambiguity than drawing.
One could argue speech is similar. There are a lot of variations of sound corresponding to a phoneme, but language reduces a continuous stream of sound to a discrete sequence of phonemes in our brain, which are then disambiguated into words and sentences conveying concepts.
The whole continuous -> discrete mapping underlies both spoken language and text.
I see text as read optimized, but write expensive and not well suited or efficient for lots of scenarios:
- wood working, absolutely horrible to work from text, which I've done.
- group ideation, as much as I love IM'ing, audio + diagrams personally feels like a more effective way of communication.
- troubleshooting, too many times I've had to text my parents how to troubleshoot their router only to end up calling them and slowly talking them through it.
These are super specific, but I'd still wager audio and video trump text in a significant number of general scenarios that require communication of some kind.
Anything that needs read optimization i.e. this is information that needs to be communicated over and over, text is better. But often that's not a requirement.
too many times I've had to text my parents how to troubleshoot their router only to end up calling them and slowly talking them through it.
This is not an inherent problem of text, but a problem of synchronous vs asynchronous communication. Round-trip latency of a phone call is much shorter than IM. But I'd say that speech and text still use the same medium (language), so it's not really an argument either way.
Cute, overly self congratulatory turns of word aside, this had me look up the etymology of text. I hadn’t put it together before, but woven is such a fitting root for the fabric of our thoughts made manifest.
I think the post conflates several quite unrelated concepts under the label text. Also what does he mean by text and information? For example he mentioned the "optical telegraph", which is a semaphore system which used a system of messages which AFAIK were not alphabetic text.
Another example if we compare logographic language systems (e.g. Chinese characters, hieroglyphs ...) to alphabetic systems. I guess we can say both are text, but logographic systems are close to pictures as well (pictographic systems even more so) and they can convey information in much less characters, at the cost that one needs to know a much larger "alphabet".
Similarly if the information we are trying to transmit is actually an image, transmitting the actual image is certainly much less information than transmitting a description of the image. That is also why the comparison with the bird and twitter image falls flat. The image conveys a specific image, not the generic image of a bird. To describe that specific would need many more characters than 4. Similarly if I have a large set of numbers, it's much more efficient to store and transmit in binary format not as text.
What are characters if not pictures? What is text if not a sequence of pictures? What's a picture if not a depiction of a concept?
In a bag-of-words type of model, I see no difference between a word and a painting, no difference between the body of work of van Gogh and the body of work of Kafka. They both use multiple sets of concepts to compose new sets of concepts.
Pictures and text are both programming languages of concepts.
He alludes to the fact that the text you wrote as a comment is transmitted as "information" in the form of bytes.
But to formulate a counterpoint to this argument and support your original comment: The bytes we send via cables to transmit text are at a basic level just that: bytes. Ones and zeros. What makes these bytes understandable information is the fact that we have all agreed that a certain sequence of bits is assigned to a certain picture: A text symbol. This agreement has been a major source of pains and problems throughout the history of computing, think all these different text encodings and the problems that arise when you try to open a file with a different encoding than the one which it was saved with: You see a gibberish of symbols that do not make sense.
Which is why you have a point here: The pc does not care what information it transmits, it is only text because we have "taught" the pc to display a specific symbol (picture) when a certain sequence of bits is encountered.
If you expand the definitions of text and pictures so they encompass all the same objects, of course you find that their expressiveness is equivalent. At that point, however, your logic is no longer connected to the team world. But since you asked, the special ingredient in text is syntax.
Yes but that's unrelated. We can clearly say that digital (binary) representation of information has won for encoding and the information content is well understood since Shannon. However this is not really connected to the current discussion, because binary is clearly is not meant for direct human "consumption".
I was restricting myself to discuss abstractions that are directly used by humans. The messages send in the optical telegraph are conveying things more complex than letters which I would say is what we associate with text. Now you might say that those messages are text, but then we might as well say language is the most flexible and efficient way of communicating, and that's probably correct, but also completely meaningless in this context. That's the issue with this posts, it's either so general that is essentially meaningless, or so specific that it's clearly wrong in general.
Agree. With code in VR it is possible to combine 3D and text for a greater result. The 3D space can be used for architectural abstraction that can be spatially memorized, and the text can be used for detail.
Self-promoting here: my project primitive.io makes it possible to collaboratively review code in VR. We use our tool daily to explain code faster and with greater information retention.
Imagine saying “always bet on punch cards”. Look at any whiteboard in any company or school. It’s filled with text and diagrams. Then watch how someone interacts with a PowerPoint or whiteboard. There is animation and dimensional extension. The way people think and organize and communicate thoughts is multifaceted and multidimensional. It only makes sense that we should be able to work and program in the same way.
It's academia and some important professions (lawyers, accountants) that are primarily audio-textual in their perception and those often occupy the most important decision-making positions, forcing their mode of operation on everybody else, even if 80% of people have a different dominant perception mode.
I don't think people are afraid of moving forward. Plenty of alternatives have been proposed, and text remains as effective as ever.
The problem with punch cards is that they weren't effective: they were what technology permitted back then. But technology permits many other things besides text nowadays, and text still remains an amazing and effective piece of "technology", in the broadest sense of the term.
Are we communicating, right now, via animation or fancy PowerPoint slides?
I don’t think hybrid or non-textual methods have really been given their due or worked on so much, simply because the only-text sentiment is so pervasive.
I’m not proposing punch cards as effective. It was just a simple comparative example, which I thought was clear and that the rest of my post clarified what I actually meant.
> Are we communicating, right now, via animation or fancy PowerPoint slides?
It’s ironic you bring this up, because I don’t find this method particularly effective.
> I don’t think hybrid or non-textual methods have really been given their due or worked on so much,
The problem is that they really have. Visual thinkers in academia have been aggressively pursuing this in CS PhDs and research since the 80s or even 70s.
The results haven't been great. Visual programming works well for some limited cases. Rational Rose, which produces code from UML diagrams, came out in 1994 and has been in continuous development since, has not taken over the world.
The big problem is high information density. With text you can go through it in a linear fashion, even if it's very long. Diagrams tend to hit a breaking point where they're too complex to take in. There's no clear place to start. Then suddenly they are worthless.
Text is not the oldest - nor easiest to use -, text is a heavy abstraction born somewhat recently in human history.
The oldest and easiest is the visual in 3D, then comes the visual in 2D.
Those exist since we have eyes.
Our brain have dedicated and sizeable infrastructure for that. Children can communicate in 3D (gestures, posture, expressions, objects) and in 2D drawings before learning textural communication with great effort.
Text is more regular and reliable in certain contexts (not always, sometimes a pictogram or others are better), when the circumstances are proper for that.
Text has its uses, just like all the other forms, not being paramount, not at all!
(I'd also argue about that we could read old texts. Sometimes yes, but sometimes we cannot read present ones neither if the cultural and knowledge background is inadequate. Which is just aggravated by the ages)
That's true. But the oldest isn't necessarily the best; civilization happened at roughly the same time text started becoming widespread, and that doesn't seem like a coincidence.
It's also interesting that 3D is so hard to translate into a usable context in computing. VR has felt like a second-class citizen compared to a mouse and keyboard in terms of usability. Not that the two are mutually exclusive – it was nice having as many giant monitors as you wanted in a 3D space.
What's needed is a 3D web browser, with websites connected with portals that you can walk through. I think gather.town is surprisingly close to that. http://gather.town/
The reason human knowledge develops so fast is the existence of text. If we rely on visual in 3D we will be the same as other animals. Apparently now we are behaving badly since we are consuming videos and pictures rather than text.
I believe text is superior because of its abstraction, when you read, you are creating alongside the author.
I agree on the power of text as a technology, and the role it played. China & the Roman Republic/Empire are good examples of this.
But.... I think it's worth remembering that we lost something as we gained something. We tend to severely underestimate oral "technologies." Scholarship existed before writing. History, geography, etc. Text spent centuries or millennia as a peripheral media. It was mostly used for accounting in Mesopotamia & the Levant for thousands if years. Sometimes for religious, magical or political reasons. It wasn't a major medium for philosophy, storytelling, history or such until much later... So writing didn't really play much of a "knowledge accumulation" role until pretty late in the game.
I suspect that it developed so slowly because oral traditions were hard to beat. They had their own advantages. A song was an efficient way to learn history.
An important, if subtle, fact is that mediums are not just for communication. They're modes of thought. Text and speech will yield different ideas. Mathematics are a huge example. Ways of conveying mathematical concepts (eg negative numbers) enables us to conceive of mathematical concepts. If you write an essay, the ideas/conclusions you will have will be different. Even the difference between a scroll and a codex (book) can make a big difference. That difference is evident if you compare the modern practice of Judaism (scroll tradition) to Islam and Christianity (book traditions).
Socrates/Plato give us a nominally dividing line between the oral and written approaches. Socrates may have even been illiterate, but either way, his main medium was oral. In fact, most Greek philosophy came from the "mostly oral" period. This is why Plato, Aristotle, (Diogenes?) and others of that generation become so important. They're the link. They wrote down ideas created by oralists. This is how they could be accessed by macedonians, Romans and such.
I wonder if the charming, curious style we associate with the likes of Socrates or Diogenes is inherent to oralism. Compare them to later, literary philosophers... The literalists are far more grim. Senecca comes to mind. Even Aristotle. He's not as grim as roman philosophers, but he is a lot more serious. The oralists were playful... and greek/roman philosophy (imo) declines as writing overtakes oral traditions.
Socrates' thoughts "On the Forgetfulness that Comes with Writing" are recorded (tellingly) by Plato. It's not Plato's best piece, but very relevant to our times. If you memorise instead of using text, all your knowledge is inside your head. On paper, ideas are lifeless. Living ideas inside your head interact with each other, refine, create new ideas. When we convey them to one another, we can ask questions, read expressions, etc.
We don't just have books, we have the internet and pocket computers to access it. Socrates' point applies even more now.
One relevant example relevant to our times is "shades of uncertainty." Say you read an article about the economy, GDP growth, unemployment & such. A lot of that information is uncertain, either inherently or at this point in time. There may be dissident positions. That's usually lost in text but not in conversation.
I definitely think a short conversation about this year's economic data is more informative and deep than an article by that same economist.
> We tend to severely underestimate oral "technologies." Scholarship existed before writing.
This comes up a lot in Bible scholarship.
Many modern people assume the words of Jesus, for example, were lost to a game of telephone before being written down years later in the form we have today.
But conveying the teachers words with true fidelity to what he said was very important to a rabbi's students, and they had a culture and techniques to make sure they did this with high reliability.
Year 0 in Judea (and Rome, Damascus...) was a pretty literate period and literacy was (the story of jesus confirms) already a religious requirement... bar mitzva or an ancestor of that custom. Bar mitzva translates roughly to "eligible to uphold commandments." You need to read for that, or so the custom implies.
I'm sure that most of the religious/rabbinical tradition was still oral, and that rabbis did a lot of oral teaching. But, I think high fidelity oral "technology" was already heavily diluted, especially in judaic culture. Scriptural worship starts very early. It's hard to say when exactly, but it had to have happened while hebrew/canaanite was still spoken in the region. Aramaic had overtaken hebrew circa 400-500 BC. From that point, high fidelity transmission was done with writing.
Also, the multicultural/multilingual/multiregional context makes it unlikely that a high fidelity oral tradition existed in early christianity. IMO, the new testament was almost certainly compiled from earlier written sources... and oral telephone. I mean, the new testament isn't even in the same language as the sermons.
The same can be said about mishnah/talmud... the jewish contemporary to the new testament. Traditionally, it is seen as a compilation of jewish oral traditions, received at mount sinai and maintained with fidelity for two thousand years. Realistically, there were earlier written versions of (eg) Rabbi Hillel's teachings available to the scribes who compiled the Mishnah.
The traditional reasoning for writing the "oral torah" (resulting in talmud/mishna) was that oral traditions were dying, and that writing was necessary for fidelity. Multiregionalism, multilingualism and such were to blame... and the christians would have had even more of those problems. Fewer, more dispersed. No institutions. No common language. No old traditions. It's possible that there was a tradition of reciting Jesus' sermons, but that would be kind of culturally out of place. I think it's pretty unlikely. If there was, I think the new testament would have been compiled in aramaic.
Also... there are quite a few convergences between new testament stories and other (broadly termed) rabbinical accounts from the period. John the Baptist has his own religion, for example, and in their books you get some of the same stories, but with John in the Jesus role. I suspect there were many others, but have no modern adherents.
Judaism of that period aggressively trimmed out any new or recent "revelatory" writings. New prophets, new conversations directly with god. That's what many of the "apocrypha" are. From then on, religious scripture needed to be wisdom received from oral traditions, old sages and stuff. No revelation.
These, to me, strongly suggests late 2nd temple judaism was no better at oral tradition than us. That said, you can have conceptual fidelity without having word-by-word fidelity. When Jesus paraphrased Hillel, he was reaching across 400 years of oral (probably/mostly) tradition. Christians doing the same thing 200 years later probably had that level of fidelity.
As someone who worked long in the visual field (Film, VFX, Graphics, Art) and has a ton of experience with text based expression (studied philosophy, programming) in my eyes picture based communication certainly is powerful.
However reading pictures is much more subjective than most non-arts-educated might tend to realise. We had a weekly class where we would discuss scenes and pictures and what it evoked in people, what they "read" in it. The one big takeaway I got from this, is just how profoundly different a room full of people can see very clear pictures. This subjectiveness is even worse when you look at gestures and body language of actors – what one student saw as strong and self sufficient, the other might see as forceful and destructive etc.
Of course we also have codified visual languages (traffic signs, warning labels, ...), but they only will work for low complexity info ("Warning slippy surface", but not: "Watch out the last step of that stairway was built to high and might cause you to fall"). The low information density of such symbols is great if you want simple messages to be understandable by a big number of persons very quickly and with little cognitive overhead.
Text can shine when symbols don't suffice, when pictures are to vague, when gestures are unclear. Text is easy to create, modify and copy and I love it for that. My freelance time as a graphic designer convinced me that many people think they can communicate visually, while very few actually can. A lot of people already have issues with getting their message (be it text or spoken word) understood in the way they meant it at the side of the recipient, with visual language this is likely worse.
The thing is, "text" and "pictures" are somewhat vague super-categories that aren't very well defined in a lot of comments on this thread. It's ironic that a discussion about the precision of text is noisy because of of the imprecision of text.
Are emojies text ? the blog post found a 4000-byte Twitter logo and cited this as evidence of the efficiency of text, but they forgot that there is a vast store of similary-sized photos that cost nothing more than 3 or 4 bytes and sometimes less, comparable to the very same letters they are using to write the post (and conveying much more than a single useless-on-its-own sound). By any definition that depend on the fact that text is stored as contiguous bytes, emojies ARE text.
Are 2D tables text ? they are not linear (not as we see them) yet one table with entries arranged appropriately could be much more percise and expressive than a truck-load of prose paragraphs. And an xy plot is much more expressive than both. 2D tables is not that much more expensive in storage than text though (a bunch of html tags surrounding the text is one representation), and an xy plot could be derived from a table by computation. So with a little bit of computation you gain the precision and expressiveness of a visual plot with the storage overhead of a bunch of numbers. This example (simplistically) mirrors current work in ML on compression of photos and videos. Imagine if computers are advanced enough that a picture is no more storage than an emojii, all arguments. about "efficiency" of text that appeal to its economic representation in computer memory become moot then.
The point I'm making is: "text" vs. "pictures" is not fine-grained enough of a distinction. The real distinction is [ "numbers" vs. "graphs" vs. "letters" vs. "tables" vs. ...), its a big multiway competition between various forms of symbols and symbol-organization schemas humans invented for a variety of purposes and arguments for or against any of them shouldn't appeal to how they are represented or communicated (text could be drawn on photos or arranged on powerpoint slides, images could be compressed and redrawn to a high degree of fidelity). And there is a lot of paradigms "in-between" that piggy-backs on one of the two representation but aren't either of them (plots, tables, emojies). Tools and technological limitations are also to blame for a lot of pictures' shortcomings, the ability to copy-paste being one of them.
A lot of discussions here would benefit alot if all parties state beforehand exactly what are their definition of text and what their argument appeals to in that definition.
I cannot see in visual 3D. If anything I can see in strictly bigger than 2D. (a flat 'screen' with a tinge of depth perception, which I fear I don't make much use of when I spend most of my time in front of a flat 2D computer screen)
Photography is about 200 years old. Film (moving images) is about 100 years old. The ability to easy create video is about 20 years old.
Compare all of that to text, which is at least thousands of years old. And then compare text to speech, which is hundreds of thousands of years old. Had a way to record and replay audio been developed before writing, it’s likely that you’d be listening to this comment right now, not reading it.
I’d say we’re at the extreme beginning of a highly audiovisual age. A millennium or two from now, writing “dead” words might seem as ancient to our descendants as foot messengers appear to us: useful for particular purposes but mostly irrelevant.
On a related note, the concept of logocentrism seems relevant here:
Case in point: text messaging. Quoting the Spolsky ('Not Just Usability', 2004) speaking about "social user interfaces."
Many humans are less inhibited when they’re typing than when they are speaking face-to-face. Teenagers are less shy. With cellphone text messages, they’re more likely to ask each other out on dates. That genre of software was so successful socially that it’s radically improving millions of people’s love lives (or at least their social calendars). Even though text messaging has a ghastly user interface, it became extremely popular with the kids. The joke of it is that there’s a much better user interface built into every cellphone for human to human communication: this clever thing called “phone calls.”
It's not just dates. It's "How ru?" & "running 3m late" and such. This has advanced to where text messaging is now a distinct written dialect, unintelligible to someone from 1993. Meanwhile, voice messages and such are more peripheral... even though they now work through the same UIs and we all have earpieces in our ears anyway. Text is powerful.
That said, text is not always the most powerful media. Photos/selfies and such have become a major 1-to-1 communication medium too. I often find that a phone conversation way more efficient than an email chain.
I also think there are categories of writing that shouldn't be. "Number articles" where an article is describing a company's financial's, for example. A lot of newspapers try to describe a table in essay form. The table would be better. That is still text though, in the sense that this article uses the term.
Choosing the most powerful medium or submedium is crucially important.
It has been a factor, certainly. Probably both good and bad. Spolsky was a pioneer in his concepts of "social user interfaces," and that really showed when he did stackoverflow.
Lowering inhibitions is a broad statement. You can get more detailed. Inhibition is multifaceted, lots of flavours. We can be less inhibited about sending a quick "I love you," less inhibited about arguing, being mean, etc.
Over the last 17 years, all this stuff has experienced a massive multiplier effect. Both the positives and the negatives are multiplied and as culture grows around the technology everything gets more complex.
This discussion right here is all text. Imagine if it was pictures instead. Imagine representing any of the comments in form of a picture. Won't be one picture representing a 1000 words.
May be the another truth is that "a word is worth a 1000 pictures".
> "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."
348 comments
[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 108 ms ] threadAuthor is really excited about really old information technology. He makes some good points.
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.
Text is just a serialisation format for the AST. For some reason we still insist on editing the serialisation format instead of the actual data representation.
The sad thing is that it was abused, horribly, in the early naughts when people tried to take it too far. On the one hand it was rushed out without the proper tooling and you had humans typing raw xml without the right amount of support from intelligent autocomplete coming from schema-aware editors. On the other, you had systems that tried to force XML into roles that are better suited for a programming language (I'm looking at you, ANT). And worst of all, it became the centerpiece of a bunch of tech that people really hated-- remember all that crazy WS-* shit, and "SOAP" (which could have stood for "Complex Object Access Protocol". All this wasn't the "fault" of XML which, IMHO, has rock-solid core concepts. XML got an undeserved bad rep from association to the failure of the things it was used with.
XML still survives, though. The tooling is good. If you type XAML or HTML in the right editors, it's serves the purpose competently and without drama. People aren't going crazy finding new XML based applications anymore. It's just doing it's job. I prefer pure XML for config files even now-- of course I never expect users to see it or type it. XML, at the end of the day, is intended to be manipulated by tools.
I wish I could say the same for yaml and to some extent json. I feel like these things are about to be abused like XML was.
HTML isn't XML, though XML was inspired by HTML and HTML has an XML serialization.
IIRC, some or all of the versions of XAML aren't, strictly, XML either, merely XML-derivedl0
No. HTML used to be "an application" of SGML. Meaning HTML brings a profile for SGML features (formerly, an SGML declaration determining things such as allowing tag inference and other minimization) plus a DTD grammar. Though HTML has also quirks for script/style elements, and URLs.
OTOH, XML, like SGML, is a markup meta-language and a proper subset of SGML (also with a fixed SGML declaration disallowing tag inference and almost all other minimization features). XML was introduced by W3C (the SGML "extended review board") as the markup meta-language for new vocabularies on the web going forward around 1997 to eventually replace HTML. While that hasn't happened, SVG and MathML have been specified using XML.
Details on (my pages) below.
[1]: http://sgmljs.net/blog/blog1701.html (the "TALK" slides)
[2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jy-b4jeJSas
> No. HTML used to be "an application" of SGML.
The “No” is wrong. It's true that HTML used to be an SGML application, but that doesn't contradict that XML was inspired by HTML.
Specifically:
(1) First, HTML was an SGML application.
(2) Then the Web took over, making HTML a very popular SGML application.
(3) Then, inspired by the design of HTML, but seeking broader application without the complexity of unconstrained SGML, XML was created.
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.
i don't think that's fair. i mean, on a computer, you have to serialize everything into sequences of bytes. you could also encode images into XML:
but i wouldn't say that makes them "textual".Not nowhere. Labview is/was pretty successful. But not generally successful, no.
They are super popular in game development. The most popular one is Unreal Engine's "Blueprint". Unity does not include visual scripting, but there are popular plugins on Asset Store, the biggest one is PlayMaker. Unity Technologies themselves plan to release their own, in-engine visual programming tool this year.
Apart from that, visual programming is commonly used for shader programming, video compositing and AI/animations scripting [1].
I am a programmer and like many of my peers I cannot stand those systems, but designers and artists love them. They are widely used everywhere from small indie games up to AAA releases, not only for simple logic but for modelling complex behaviours and flow controls too.
https://blueprintsfromhell.tumblr.com
[1] Example of AI graph form The Division (5:34 - 6:10): https://youtu.be/fZOZ2daE-lA?t=334
I am also a programmer but I love my graphical shader editor in Octane [0]! It's the perfect interface for defining a graphical data flow. For example, I can implement really complex spatial conditionals by creating a merge node controlled by a greyscale bitmap. E.g. to create a gold thread on a silk material, I can merge existing gold and silk shaders through a bitmap of a lace pattern, itself edited in Photoshop. Just by connecting some nodes.
[0] https://home.otoy.com/render/octane-render/
As was already pointed out, graphical languages are massive in game design. They are also used in audio processing, in scientific and engineering software through labView, and in various other places.
They are very popular in fields where we want to open up programming to more people than those who call themselves "programmers".
Sure you wouldn’t want to implement the underlying systems in them, but I do think they have their place and are often undervalued by developers.
The issues with graphical languages arethings like being much harder diff/merge and version control generally, being dependent on IDEs, and severely limited by mouse usage. I don't see any of those issues as being impossible to overcome, but instead graphical programming is held back by always being implemented as a DSL with no attempt to meet the requirements of a general purpose language.
I think there are three reasons why non-textual programming is constricted to a few domains, and is not widespread as general-purpose:
- As you point out, all the tooling around programming like editors, exchange formats, version control, debuggers etc. are only available for text, rendering everything else generally unusable.
- There are many failed attempts, with many still being textual in the end, only with over-the-top syntax highlighting, such as Scratch. These attempts have paved the way of non-textual programming with gravestones, making the field look like a graveyard, so nobody wants to get into it anymore. Scratch might still have its place in education as an gentle introduction to the concepts of programming, but no software developer is seriously going to use it for any big project.
- People are used to text and they will reject other approaches instinctively. You can read many statements in this discussion here like: "Graphical programming would make your head explode", which I think is similar to how people where afraid of using trains in the early days: "Driving to fast will kill you" and "Nobody can survive such speeds". It might take a whole new generation of programmers to accept anything non-textual as intuitive (which is why it could become popular with artists and designers I think).
I despise videos when I want to learn something. Give me a nice text (+ pictures if a subject requires it) so I can follow at my own pace: slow down, skip or skim as needed.
For other things (e.g. repair a part on a bike) text requires images, to really be able to quickly grasp what one has to do.
Finally, for learning e.g. dance moves I really want a movie (or a live instructor).
So like usual "it depends".
Videos are simply not that for me. Perhaps with actual 3D videos and improved tooling we might get there (eg. ability to zoom in on an instructor's hips in "infinite" resolution if you are having trouble following that particular bit of their motion).
And I mean, you can sure learn from a video, but I just find it harder. Eg. I can go look at dance or basketball moves and try to reconstruct them, but it's usually a couple of core points that need to be taken in to achieve them that are much easier to grasp when broken into fundamentals.
However, videos where the gist of the work is on the student, vs on the instructor, are much easier to make, which I believe is part of their popularity!
Yes, Text, Text, Text - The past, present and future of writing (and publishing).
[1] https://github.com/officetxt/awesome-txt
Text is very powerful, but it doesn't need to always work by itself (arguably works best together with other media)
This does not diminish the value and expressiveness of text, but it needs to be said that in 5000 years time we'll need both the Unicode specification and those 2-4000 bytes to decipher the author's post.
It's just a cost of digital media.
The bigger issue is how do we ensure digital media perseveres for so long.
Having english still understood after 5000 years seems much harder. But hey, latin is pretty old and we still understand that.
Nitpick: In all likelihood, an English dictionary would be enough. Even if the Unicode spec is lost, the text can probably be deciphered by using frequency analysis plus the dictionary to associate codepoints with characters.
My point was that there is a lot of implied data that undermines this "compression" of information into "simply bytes" today: I am pointing out the implicit in OP's assumption.
Maybe I did not choose the right addendum, but a pretty comprehensive addendum is needed (in all likelihood, an "ancient English dictionary" is needed anyways).
That got a good chuckle out of me. It actually shows how there's not just "text".
It's clearly a continuum from 3D objects, to pictures, to icons and ideographs, to highly abstract sings representing words and ultimately sounds. That fact that some designer of character sets decided to put the limit somewhere and include a bird icon and not an Obama icon does not invalidate other interpretations.
By the way, there is a thing called Emojicon where a character for 'Albert Einstein' was proposed as valid 'text'.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egyptian_Hieroglyphs_(Unicode_...
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)
As originally worded, it only sounded like "hey, this dude is famous" (for HN value of famous :-), so I would appreciate the commentary you just shared right off the bat! Thanks again for the clarification!
Text is also why XML, JSON, and Markdown are a thing.
When you can accomplish your tasks within a constrained range of expressivity, you do that (gas & break pedals, steering wheel, door handles, etc). But when you need greater expressivity, you're probably going to need text.
On the other hand, many (technical/mathematical) concepts are more effectively explained using diagrams/images.
E.g. the very visual approach taken in Mathologer videos [1] makes difficult, esoteric, mathematical ideas accessible to a wider audience.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iJ8pnCO0nTY
https://www.florence-nightingale.co.uk/coxcomb-diagram-1858/
E.g where does musical notation stand? For an untrained eye it is just a bunch of lines, dots and squiggles but others will read it like text and much more efficiently so than if it were written words.
Similarly the example about the Wikipedia text of human rights being supposedly impossible to convey via image. But what does the text convey to you if you don’t speak English?
Text is the written form of language. And language is defined as a sequence of symbols. Thus, text is a subset of diagrams. Arbitrary diagrams can be of any topology (e.g. DAGs or even have cycles), however text always is of sequential topology (or a hierarchy as there is an isomorphic mapping to sequences).
Basically, if there is a canonical way of reading it out loud, then it has an explicit sequence and is thus text.
By that rule it follows that: Musical notation is text as it is strictly sequential (in time) and maybe hierarchical if there are multiple tracks. Most mathematical notations are text, as they are also sequential, even matrices are only a hierarchy of sequences which in turn can be serialized. Chemical / molecular diagrams are not text, they can contain cycles. Same goes for electronic and logic circuit schematics or rail way diagrams found in public transportation.
> Similarly the example about the Wikipedia text of human rights being supposedly impossible to convey via image
Schematics and diagrams are only use full if / because they are subject to a certain defined visual vocabulary. So if you had a visual vocabulary in that domain then you could express them as a diagram.
In this case the diagrams are good for communication but terrible for expression, I think this distinction is being overlooked by many here.
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 leans to data.
This is an exaggeration, life is almost always a grey area - but I hope you get my point.
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.
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26164409
I've seen a similar story of someone thinking "lol" meant "lots of love" and used it to end messages regarding the death of a family member.
But what about cases where a font designer changes, say, an emoji face with a light, content smile to a shy smile? This has the chance to undermine the entire emotional content of a message, without sender and recipient ever noticing.
For a more concrete example, have a look at https://emojipedia.org/beaming-face-with-smiling-eyes/ . Is it just me who thinks that the glyphs by Apple and WhatsApp show a beaming face with a somewhat sly touch whereas most others simply display happiness?
iirc some japanese character sets already had them (introduced by telecoms for text messaging?), so originally they were included for compatibility [i.e. to fulfill Unicode's goal of being able to encode everything]. then people discovered the emoji keyboard on iphones and it got popular
That puts blame on the wrong organisation. The consortium is to the most part only standardising existing character repertoires. Emojis were popularised by a mobile phone equipment manufacturer as a marketing stunt. http://enwp.org/Emoji#History
> font designers now have control over the way I get to express my emotions
This could have been a major issue, but media platforms recognized it and have provided their own pictograms for years, mostly compatible with each other.
In the case of emojis, both the sender's and the recipient's software agree on the message content but the actual persons no longer do because the content is suddenly being displayed very differently.
Ignoring the arguments of whether to include the nose (the original form was :-) which I much prefer) on the basic examples, people introduced new combinations faster than I cared to pay attention to so knowing what they meant was not always easy.
It ended up that there were whole dictionary like lists of them in some Usenet groups' FAQ documents.
As soon as you have more than a few of any symbolic representation (text smilies, emoji, gifs/memes[†], ...), it becomes dynamic grammar in its own right and away from the core few it is a mess of people not understanding what you mean either because they don't get your reference or you have used a reference incorrectly (or, if incorrectly is the wrong term, in a manner differing significantly from its common use).
[†] it is less of an issue with meme images/animations as they usually have a text portion making them far less ambiguous, but the issue is still there overall
According to my understanding a medium is a mean of communication, thus including text. OTOH it seams from your message that these are two complementary objects. Is my understanding correct?
I don't agree with that. A photo doesn't contain much information about the emotional state of the photographer, unlike a few lines in a diary. My travel diaries are much richer in sentiment than my travel photos.
To me, emojis are a form of data compression. Common concepts are compressed into symbols: happy, sad, car, eggplant with 3 drops. Emojis are macros. That works as long as you exchange common concepts ("I feel sick"), but it falls flat if you need to venture beyond that ("My back is itchy"). You couldn't write a country's constitution with emojis. At least you shouldn't.
Likewise, a picture only shows what's visible. Travel photos don't capture the smell, the temperature, or how you feel after staying up all night with a sick stomach. A few words in a diary will.
Really? Why are video games so visual, in that case? To update you on the situation your character is in, inform you where the enemies are, give you feedback on your current health and objectives... most video games use a rich graphical system of colors and symbols overlaid over a high resolution image of the game world...
If text is more efficient at communicating ‘events’, why aren’t there ‘action text adventures’?
I probably have blown more time on text MUDs than all other computer gaming combined, but even back when I used to play things like counterstrike I spent an inordinate amount of time using text to chat with team mates or in the console binding and triggering macros.
Given the current state of information technology, I agree that we are most efficient at processing text. However, that can change pretty quickly. Storage mechanisms similar to DNA can make the difference between text and multimedia irrelevant. It will happen because nature already does that.
Our eyes have the ability to input so much information which is what makes pictures valuable.
If you simply need to transmit small/simple data then text is the way to go.
I get what the author is trying to communicate, but it seems a bit arrogant
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.
There is no such thing as pictures. It’s just photons that bounce off or are emitted by certain surfaces that fall on our eyes and are then transmitted as electric impulses to our brains which trigger synapses....it’s all just stuff firing in our brains.
It’s pretty obvious what the author of the article means by picture and texts. I don’t think there’s anyone who is not trying to be deliberately obtuse who would have a hard time figuring out what they mean by pictures and text here.
But my intention was question validity of series of claims the author making using full loaded abstract words - " Text is everything" " text is the most powerful, useful, effective communication" . Of course the author should expect to be challenged on meaning of words.
Let's say you looking at some painting painted by a person who wanted "paint" the emotion inside his brain. Not sure you can completely paint the emotions as picture. But author claims is text can completely express the painting or the emotion - that is not true. Can someone write words to describe me - how lemon taste? And I get same feeling on my tongue after reading "text" ?
They have more "letters", but the point is still to unambiguously map a drawing of a character to a specific, discrete value.
It certainly is not.
Think about character recognition software. The point is to take a picture, and map it to a discrete value. The pictures that correspond to "a", for example, have a lot of variation. But the point of writing is to remove the ambiguity inherent in drawing something, and map it to one of a small set of discrete values.
So even before binary encoding systems, or even the printing press, text was a technology for conveying information with less ambiguity than drawing.
One could argue speech is similar. There are a lot of variations of sound corresponding to a phoneme, but language reduces a continuous stream of sound to a discrete sequence of phonemes in our brain, which are then disambiguated into words and sentences conveying concepts.
The whole continuous -> discrete mapping underlies both spoken language and text.
- wood working, absolutely horrible to work from text, which I've done.
- group ideation, as much as I love IM'ing, audio + diagrams personally feels like a more effective way of communication.
- troubleshooting, too many times I've had to text my parents how to troubleshoot their router only to end up calling them and slowly talking them through it.
These are super specific, but I'd still wager audio and video trump text in a significant number of general scenarios that require communication of some kind.
Anything that needs read optimization i.e. this is information that needs to be communicated over and over, text is better. But often that's not a requirement.
This is not an inherent problem of text, but a problem of synchronous vs asynchronous communication. Round-trip latency of a phone call is much shorter than IM. But I'd say that speech and text still use the same medium (language), so it's not really an argument either way.
Cute, overly self congratulatory turns of word aside, this had me look up the etymology of text. I hadn’t put it together before, but woven is such a fitting root for the fabric of our thoughts made manifest.
Another example if we compare logographic language systems (e.g. Chinese characters, hieroglyphs ...) to alphabetic systems. I guess we can say both are text, but logographic systems are close to pictures as well (pictographic systems even more so) and they can convey information in much less characters, at the cost that one needs to know a much larger "alphabet".
Similarly if the information we are trying to transmit is actually an image, transmitting the actual image is certainly much less information than transmitting a description of the image. That is also why the comparison with the bird and twitter image falls flat. The image conveys a specific image, not the generic image of a bird. To describe that specific would need many more characters than 4. Similarly if I have a large set of numbers, it's much more efficient to store and transmit in binary format not as text.
What are characters if not pictures? What is text if not a sequence of pictures? What's a picture if not a depiction of a concept?
In a bag-of-words type of model, I see no difference between a word and a painting, no difference between the body of work of van Gogh and the body of work of Kafka. They both use multiple sets of concepts to compose new sets of concepts.
Pictures and text are both programming languages of concepts.
But to formulate a counterpoint to this argument and support your original comment: The bytes we send via cables to transmit text are at a basic level just that: bytes. Ones and zeros. What makes these bytes understandable information is the fact that we have all agreed that a certain sequence of bits is assigned to a certain picture: A text symbol. This agreement has been a major source of pains and problems throughout the history of computing, think all these different text encodings and the problems that arise when you try to open a file with a different encoding than the one which it was saved with: You see a gibberish of symbols that do not make sense.
Which is why you have a point here: The pc does not care what information it transmits, it is only text because we have "taught" the pc to display a specific symbol (picture) when a certain sequence of bits is encountered.
The pulses of light in an optical fiber are not alphabetic text either, but we are not talking about baseband here.
I was restricting myself to discuss abstractions that are directly used by humans. The messages send in the optical telegraph are conveying things more complex than letters which I would say is what we associate with text. Now you might say that those messages are text, but then we might as well say language is the most flexible and efficient way of communicating, and that's probably correct, but also completely meaningless in this context. That's the issue with this posts, it's either so general that is essentially meaningless, or so specific that it's clearly wrong in general.
Self-promoting here: my project primitive.io makes it possible to collaboratively review code in VR. We use our tool daily to explain code faster and with greater information retention.
Imagine saying “always bet on punch cards”. Look at any whiteboard in any company or school. It’s filled with text and diagrams. Then watch how someone interacts with a PowerPoint or whiteboard. There is animation and dimensional extension. The way people think and organize and communicate thoughts is multifaceted and multidimensional. It only makes sense that we should be able to work and program in the same way.
The problem with punch cards is that they weren't effective: they were what technology permitted back then. But technology permits many other things besides text nowadays, and text still remains an amazing and effective piece of "technology", in the broadest sense of the term.
Are we communicating, right now, via animation or fancy PowerPoint slides?
I’m not proposing punch cards as effective. It was just a simple comparative example, which I thought was clear and that the rest of my post clarified what I actually meant.
> Are we communicating, right now, via animation or fancy PowerPoint slides?
It’s ironic you bring this up, because I don’t find this method particularly effective.
The problem is that they really have. Visual thinkers in academia have been aggressively pursuing this in CS PhDs and research since the 80s or even 70s.
The results haven't been great. Visual programming works well for some limited cases. Rational Rose, which produces code from UML diagrams, came out in 1994 and has been in continuous development since, has not taken over the world.
The big problem is high information density. With text you can go through it in a linear fashion, even if it's very long. Diagrams tend to hit a breaking point where they're too complex to take in. There's no clear place to start. Then suddenly they are worthless.
The oldest and easiest is the visual in 3D, then comes the visual in 2D.
Those exist since we have eyes.
Our brain have dedicated and sizeable infrastructure for that. Children can communicate in 3D (gestures, posture, expressions, objects) and in 2D drawings before learning textural communication with great effort.
Text is more regular and reliable in certain contexts (not always, sometimes a pictogram or others are better), when the circumstances are proper for that.
Text has its uses, just like all the other forms, not being paramount, not at all!
(I'd also argue about that we could read old texts. Sometimes yes, but sometimes we cannot read present ones neither if the cultural and knowledge background is inadequate. Which is just aggravated by the ages)
It's also interesting that 3D is so hard to translate into a usable context in computing. VR has felt like a second-class citizen compared to a mouse and keyboard in terms of usability. Not that the two are mutually exclusive – it was nice having as many giant monitors as you wanted in a 3D space.
What's needed is a 3D web browser, with websites connected with portals that you can walk through. I think gather.town is surprisingly close to that. http://gather.town/
I agree on the power of text as a technology, and the role it played. China & the Roman Republic/Empire are good examples of this.
But.... I think it's worth remembering that we lost something as we gained something. We tend to severely underestimate oral "technologies." Scholarship existed before writing. History, geography, etc. Text spent centuries or millennia as a peripheral media. It was mostly used for accounting in Mesopotamia & the Levant for thousands if years. Sometimes for religious, magical or political reasons. It wasn't a major medium for philosophy, storytelling, history or such until much later... So writing didn't really play much of a "knowledge accumulation" role until pretty late in the game.
I suspect that it developed so slowly because oral traditions were hard to beat. They had their own advantages. A song was an efficient way to learn history.
An important, if subtle, fact is that mediums are not just for communication. They're modes of thought. Text and speech will yield different ideas. Mathematics are a huge example. Ways of conveying mathematical concepts (eg negative numbers) enables us to conceive of mathematical concepts. If you write an essay, the ideas/conclusions you will have will be different. Even the difference between a scroll and a codex (book) can make a big difference. That difference is evident if you compare the modern practice of Judaism (scroll tradition) to Islam and Christianity (book traditions).
Socrates/Plato give us a nominally dividing line between the oral and written approaches. Socrates may have even been illiterate, but either way, his main medium was oral. In fact, most Greek philosophy came from the "mostly oral" period. This is why Plato, Aristotle, (Diogenes?) and others of that generation become so important. They're the link. They wrote down ideas created by oralists. This is how they could be accessed by macedonians, Romans and such.
I wonder if the charming, curious style we associate with the likes of Socrates or Diogenes is inherent to oralism. Compare them to later, literary philosophers... The literalists are far more grim. Senecca comes to mind. Even Aristotle. He's not as grim as roman philosophers, but he is a lot more serious. The oralists were playful... and greek/roman philosophy (imo) declines as writing overtakes oral traditions.
Socrates' thoughts "On the Forgetfulness that Comes with Writing" are recorded (tellingly) by Plato. It's not Plato's best piece, but very relevant to our times. If you memorise instead of using text, all your knowledge is inside your head. On paper, ideas are lifeless. Living ideas inside your head interact with each other, refine, create new ideas. When we convey them to one another, we can ask questions, read expressions, etc.
We don't just have books, we have the internet and pocket computers to access it. Socrates' point applies even more now.
One relevant example relevant to our times is "shades of uncertainty." Say you read an article about the economy, GDP growth, unemployment & such. A lot of that information is uncertain, either inherently or at this point in time. There may be dissident positions. That's usually lost in text but not in conversation.
I definitely think a short conversation about this year's economic data is more informative and deep than an article by that same economist.
This comes up a lot in Bible scholarship.
Many modern people assume the words of Jesus, for example, were lost to a game of telephone before being written down years later in the form we have today.
But conveying the teachers words with true fidelity to what he said was very important to a rabbi's students, and they had a culture and techniques to make sure they did this with high reliability.
Year 0 in Judea (and Rome, Damascus...) was a pretty literate period and literacy was (the story of jesus confirms) already a religious requirement... bar mitzva or an ancestor of that custom. Bar mitzva translates roughly to "eligible to uphold commandments." You need to read for that, or so the custom implies.
I'm sure that most of the religious/rabbinical tradition was still oral, and that rabbis did a lot of oral teaching. But, I think high fidelity oral "technology" was already heavily diluted, especially in judaic culture. Scriptural worship starts very early. It's hard to say when exactly, but it had to have happened while hebrew/canaanite was still spoken in the region. Aramaic had overtaken hebrew circa 400-500 BC. From that point, high fidelity transmission was done with writing.
Also, the multicultural/multilingual/multiregional context makes it unlikely that a high fidelity oral tradition existed in early christianity. IMO, the new testament was almost certainly compiled from earlier written sources... and oral telephone. I mean, the new testament isn't even in the same language as the sermons.
The same can be said about mishnah/talmud... the jewish contemporary to the new testament. Traditionally, it is seen as a compilation of jewish oral traditions, received at mount sinai and maintained with fidelity for two thousand years. Realistically, there were earlier written versions of (eg) Rabbi Hillel's teachings available to the scribes who compiled the Mishnah.
The traditional reasoning for writing the "oral torah" (resulting in talmud/mishna) was that oral traditions were dying, and that writing was necessary for fidelity. Multiregionalism, multilingualism and such were to blame... and the christians would have had even more of those problems. Fewer, more dispersed. No institutions. No common language. No old traditions. It's possible that there was a tradition of reciting Jesus' sermons, but that would be kind of culturally out of place. I think it's pretty unlikely. If there was, I think the new testament would have been compiled in aramaic.
Also... there are quite a few convergences between new testament stories and other (broadly termed) rabbinical accounts from the period. John the Baptist has his own religion, for example, and in their books you get some of the same stories, but with John in the Jesus role. I suspect there were many others, but have no modern adherents.
Judaism of that period aggressively trimmed out any new or recent "revelatory" writings. New prophets, new conversations directly with god. That's what many of the "apocrypha" are. From then on, religious scripture needed to be wisdom received from oral traditions, old sages and stuff. No revelation.
These, to me, strongly suggests late 2nd temple judaism was no better at oral tradition than us. That said, you can have conceptual fidelity without having word-by-word fidelity. When Jesus paraphrased Hillel, he was reaching across 400 years of oral (probably/mostly) tradition. Christians doing the same thing 200 years later probably had that level of fidelity.
However reading pictures is much more subjective than most non-arts-educated might tend to realise. We had a weekly class where we would discuss scenes and pictures and what it evoked in people, what they "read" in it. The one big takeaway I got from this, is just how profoundly different a room full of people can see very clear pictures. This subjectiveness is even worse when you look at gestures and body language of actors – what one student saw as strong and self sufficient, the other might see as forceful and destructive etc.
Of course we also have codified visual languages (traffic signs, warning labels, ...), but they only will work for low complexity info ("Warning slippy surface", but not: "Watch out the last step of that stairway was built to high and might cause you to fall"). The low information density of such symbols is great if you want simple messages to be understandable by a big number of persons very quickly and with little cognitive overhead.
Text can shine when symbols don't suffice, when pictures are to vague, when gestures are unclear. Text is easy to create, modify and copy and I love it for that. My freelance time as a graphic designer convinced me that many people think they can communicate visually, while very few actually can. A lot of people already have issues with getting their message (be it text or spoken word) understood in the way they meant it at the side of the recipient, with visual language this is likely worse.
Are emojies text ? the blog post found a 4000-byte Twitter logo and cited this as evidence of the efficiency of text, but they forgot that there is a vast store of similary-sized photos that cost nothing more than 3 or 4 bytes and sometimes less, comparable to the very same letters they are using to write the post (and conveying much more than a single useless-on-its-own sound). By any definition that depend on the fact that text is stored as contiguous bytes, emojies ARE text.
Are 2D tables text ? they are not linear (not as we see them) yet one table with entries arranged appropriately could be much more percise and expressive than a truck-load of prose paragraphs. And an xy plot is much more expressive than both. 2D tables is not that much more expensive in storage than text though (a bunch of html tags surrounding the text is one representation), and an xy plot could be derived from a table by computation. So with a little bit of computation you gain the precision and expressiveness of a visual plot with the storage overhead of a bunch of numbers. This example (simplistically) mirrors current work in ML on compression of photos and videos. Imagine if computers are advanced enough that a picture is no more storage than an emojii, all arguments. about "efficiency" of text that appeal to its economic representation in computer memory become moot then.
The point I'm making is: "text" vs. "pictures" is not fine-grained enough of a distinction. The real distinction is [ "numbers" vs. "graphs" vs. "letters" vs. "tables" vs. ...), its a big multiway competition between various forms of symbols and symbol-organization schemas humans invented for a variety of purposes and arguments for or against any of them shouldn't appeal to how they are represented or communicated (text could be drawn on photos or arranged on powerpoint slides, images could be compressed and redrawn to a high degree of fidelity). And there is a lot of paradigms "in-between" that piggy-backs on one of the two representation but aren't either of them (plots, tables, emojies). Tools and technological limitations are also to blame for a lot of pictures' shortcomings, the ability to copy-paste being one of them.
A lot of discussions here would benefit alot if all parties state beforehand exactly what are their definition of text and what their argument appeals to in that definition.
I cannot see in visual 3D. If anything I can see in strictly bigger than 2D. (a flat 'screen' with a tinge of depth perception, which I fear I don't make much use of when I spend most of my time in front of a flat 2D computer screen)
Compare all of that to text, which is at least thousands of years old. And then compare text to speech, which is hundreds of thousands of years old. Had a way to record and replay audio been developed before writing, it’s likely that you’d be listening to this comment right now, not reading it.
I’d say we’re at the extreme beginning of a highly audiovisual age. A millennium or two from now, writing “dead” words might seem as ancient to our descendants as foot messengers appear to us: useful for particular purposes but mostly irrelevant.
On a related note, the concept of logocentrism seems relevant here:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logocentrism
Many humans are less inhibited when they’re typing than when they are speaking face-to-face. Teenagers are less shy. With cellphone text messages, they’re more likely to ask each other out on dates. That genre of software was so successful socially that it’s radically improving millions of people’s love lives (or at least their social calendars). Even though text messaging has a ghastly user interface, it became extremely popular with the kids. The joke of it is that there’s a much better user interface built into every cellphone for human to human communication: this clever thing called “phone calls.”
It's not just dates. It's "How ru?" & "running 3m late" and such. This has advanced to where text messaging is now a distinct written dialect, unintelligible to someone from 1993. Meanwhile, voice messages and such are more peripheral... even though they now work through the same UIs and we all have earpieces in our ears anyway. Text is powerful.
That said, text is not always the most powerful media. Photos/selfies and such have become a major 1-to-1 communication medium too. I often find that a phone conversation way more efficient than an email chain.
I also think there are categories of writing that shouldn't be. "Number articles" where an article is describing a company's financial's, for example. A lot of newspapers try to describe a table in essay form. The table would be better. That is still text though, in the sense that this article uses the term.
Choosing the most powerful medium or submedium is crucially important.
Spolsky was right about this when he wrote that passage in 2004.
We should take seriously the idea that the lesser inhibition of textual communication has been a drawback on net, at least over the last 17 years.
Lowering inhibitions is a broad statement. You can get more detailed. Inhibition is multifaceted, lots of flavours. We can be less inhibited about sending a quick "I love you," less inhibited about arguing, being mean, etc.
Over the last 17 years, all this stuff has experienced a massive multiplier effect. Both the positives and the negatives are multiplied and as culture grows around the technology everything gets more complex.
And from the claims it makes ("text is the oldest") it seems either forgot about it, or is not even aware such thing exists.
One was only text.
image: https://imgur.com/a/8J6yeRe
But if you started from the image, and asked people to generate a sentence from it, you would get a lot of variation from the quoted sentence.