Always Bet on Text, by the designer of Rust

I figured I should just post this somewhere so I can make future reference to how I feel about the matter, anytime someone asks me about such-and-such video, 3D, game or "dynamic" multimedia system. Don't get me wrong, I like me some illustrations, photos, movies and music.

But text wins by a mile. Text is everything. My thoughts on this are quite absolute: text is the most powerful, useful, effective communication technology ever, period.

https://graydon2.dreamwidth.org/193447.html https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26164001

It's a long-standing debate. I think it's natural that people lie all along the spectrum. Why do you find the definition of text broad, though? Everything in the pictures is in Unicode? That seems a useful definition of 'text'.

I don't think it's super clear what his argument is. I think it's very true that text is the safe bet, given its flexibility and how hard it is to get that same expressiveness in other media. It would be a mistake to say that means text is the only way forever and any alternative is doomed, and I suspect that's why Graydon danced around actually saying that. With that said, using math notation as an example in the context of computer systems is a bit iffy. I mean, he's mostly talking about encoding and transmission, but it's hard to separate "text is awesome" from the existing widespread tooling, and that latter part is not totally there for math (it exists, but in small patches relative to the larger ecosystem). Again, not exactly what he said, so I might just totally be projecting my bias here. I would definitely say that if you're going to go beyond text, natively supporting math notation would be a good direction to go. Casually using a bar for division in a large formula would be great.

This is such a narrow minded statement - has he not heard of Tufte, Feynman diagrams, Ken Iverson, or even electrical circuits?

APL is notably dead, replaced by text-based descendants, so I think that example bears out his point. Feynman diagrams are helpful, but IIUC more combinatorial schematics than complete descriptions, for which you need... well, math, which is still closer to text than pictures. Electrical circuits and Tufte (if you mean this one) are solving entirely different problems than Graydon is (granted, implicitly) considering, so I don't think those are germane examples. Graydon may be cynical here, but I don't think he's narrow-minded. Ed: he might even consider APL text to some extent. Between the abstraction level and semi-related pictures, it's hard to say precisely what his point is and isn't.

Having read this a few times before and again now, I'm now having problems grasping the basic proposition. I agree that text is useful and powerful, but how does that imply that other visual media or, say, interactive essays ("dynamic multimedia system") are not? Is there even a dichotomy here? Take a random video on youtube, how interesting, rich or useful is the text version of that? (And btw, who's reading those old stone tablets now that we have youtube?)

This piece pops up every now and again. I always try to resist commenting on it, but this time I'll indulge. Leaving aside that his own examples include a writing system that's basically strings of emojis, one cannot help but notice that the "text is everything" argument is almost always made by those who have an extremely jejune notion of text. This is one of the reasons I'm forever recommending these two papers to people interested in these questions: https://hal.inria.fr/hal-00737414 https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2661136.2661138

if text is so great, why do we need hyperlinks?

Thanks for the links to those papers @Jack Rusher