Bret Victor's point is why is this not also the approach we use for other topics, like engineering? There are many people who do not have a strong symbolic intuition, and so being able to tap into their (and our) other intuitions is a very powerful tool to increase efficiency of communication. More and more, I have found myself in this alternate philosophy of education and knowledge transmission. There are certainly limits—and text isn't going anywhere, but I think there's still a lot more to discover and try.
[1] https://dynamicland.org/2014/The_Humane_Representation_of_Th...
Bret Victor's work involves a ton of really challenging heavy lifting. You walk away from a Bret Victor presentation inspired, but also intimidated by the work put in, and the work required to do anything similar. When you separate his ideas from the work he puts in to perfect the implementation and presentation, the ideas by themselves don't seem to do much.
Which doesn't mean they're bad ideas, but it might mean that anybody hoping to get the most out of them should understand the investment that is required to bring them to fruition, and people with less to invest should stick with other approaches.
Yes, but musical notation is far superior to text for conveying the information needed to play a song.
Physical intuition is an enormous part of our intelligence, and is hard to convey in text: you could read millions of words about how to ride a bike, and you would learn nothing compared to spending a few hours trying it out and falling over until it clicks.
Text is certainly not the best at all things and I especially get the idea that in pedagogy you might want other things in a feedback loop. The strength of text however is its versatility, especially in an age where text transformers are going through a renaissance. I think 90%+ of the time you want to default to text, use text as your source of truth, and then other mediums can be brought into play (perhaps as things you transform your text into) as the circumstances warrant.
You can store everything as a string; base64 for binary, JSON for data, HTML for layout, CSS for styling, SQL for queries... Nothing gets closer to the mythical silver-bullet that developers have been chasing since the birth of the industry.
The holy grail of programming has been staring us in the face for decades and yet we still keep inventing new data structures and complex tools to transfer data... All to save like 30% bandwidth; an advantage which is almost fully cancelled out anyway after you GZIP the base64 string which most HTTP servers do automatically anyway.
Same story with ProtoBuf. All this complexity is added to make everything binary. For what goal? Did anyone ever ask this question? To save 20% bandwidth, which, again is an advantage lost after GZIP... For the negligible added CPU cost of deserialization, you completely lose human readability.
In this industry, there are tools and abstractions which are not given the respect they deserve and the humble string is definitely one of them.
AFAIKT, binary format of a protobuf message is strictly to provide a strong forward/backward compatibility guarantee. If it's not for that, the text proto format and even the jaon format are both versatile, and commonly used as configuration language (i.e. when humans need to interact with the file).
My old 1995 MS thesis was written in Lotus Word Pro and the last I looked, there was nothing to read it. (I could try Wine, perhaps. Or I could quickly OCR it from paper.) Anyway, I wish it were plain text!
For example, when you gzip a Base64-encoded picture, you end up 1. encoding it in base64 (takes a *lot* of CPU) and then, compressing it (again! jpeg is already compressed).
I think what it boils down to is scale; if you are running a small shop and performance is not critical, sure, do everything in HTTP/1.1 if that makes you more productive. But when numbers start mattering, designing binary protocols from scratch can save a lot of $ in my experience.
You can still stream the base64 separately and reference it inside the JSON somehow like an attachment. The base64 string is much more versatile.
Using base64 means that you must encode and decode it, but binary data directly means that is unnecessary. (This is true whether or not it is compressed (and/or encrypted); if it is compressed then you must decompress it, but that is independent of whether or not you must decode base64.)
Anything below 3 is considered "partially illiterate".
I've been thinking about this a lot recently, as someone who cares about technical communication and making technical topics accessible to more people.
Maybe wannabe educators like myself should spend more time making content for TikTok or YouTube!
I think the obsession with text comes down to two factors: conflating binary data with closed standards and poor tooling support. Text implies a baseline level of acceptable mediocrity for both. Consider a CSV file will millions of base64 encoded columns and no column labels. That would really not be any friendlier than a binary file with a openly documented format and suitable editing tool, e.g. sqlite.
Maybe a lack of fundamental technical skills is another culprit, but binary files really aren't that scary.
Text is human readable writing (not necessarily ASCII). It is most certainly not just any old bytes the way you are saying.
Reading “Mathematica - A secret world of intuition and curiosity” as well and a part stuck out in a section called The Language Trap. Example author gives is about for a recipe for making banana bread, that if you’re familiar with bananas, it’s obvious that you need to peel them before mashing. Bit of you haven’t seen a banana, you’d have no clue what to do. Does a recipe say peel a banana or should that be ignored? Questions like these are clear coming up more with AI and context, but it’s the same for humans. He ends that section saying most people prefer a video for cooking rather than a recipe.
Other quote from him:
“The language trap is the belief that naming things is enough to make them exist, and we can dispense with the effort of really imagining them.”
I'm a linguist, and I've worked in endangered languages and in minority languages (many of which will some day become endangered, in the sense of not having native speakers). The advantage of plain text (Unicode) formats for documenting such languages (as opposed to binary formats like Word used to be, or databases, or even PDFs) is that text formats are the only thing that will stanmd the test of time. The article by Steven Bird and Gary Simons "Seven Dimensions of Portability for Language Documentation and Description" was the seminal paper on this topic, published in 2002. I've given later conference talks on the topic, pointing out that we can still read grammars of Greek and Latin (and Sanskrit) written thousands of years ago. And while the group I led published our grammars in paper form via PDF, we wrote and archived them as XML documents, which (along with JSON) are probably as reproducible a structured format as you can get. I'm hoping that 2000 years from now, someone will find these documents both readable and valuable.
There is of course no replacement for some binary format when it comes to audio.
(By "binary" format I mean file formats that are not sequential and readily interpretable, whereas text files are interpretable once you know the encoding.)
Our image models got good when we started making shared image and text embedding spaces. A picture is worth 1000 words, but 1000 words about millions of images are what allowed us to teach computers to see.
The image is of a monochrome logo with anti-aliased edges. Due to being a simple filled geometric shape, it could compress well with RLE, ZIP compression, or even predictors. It could even be represented as vector drawing commands (LineTo, CurveTo, etc...).
In a 1-bit-per-pixel format, a 20x20 image ends up as 400 bits (50 bytes).
2021 (570 points, 339 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26164001
2015 (156 points, 69 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10284202
2014 (355 points, 196 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8451271
It's almost like some people think human-readability, transparency and maintainability are negatives!
Text will win, unless there is a lower effort option. The lower effort option does not need to be better, just easier.
But I can't help feel that we try to jam everything into that format because that's what's already ubiquitous. Reminds me of how every hobby OS is a copy of some Unix/Posix system.
If we had a more general structured format would we say the opposite?
The 1% where something else is better?
Youtube videos that show you how to access hidden fasteners on things you want to take apart.
Not that I can't get absolutely anything open, but sometimes it's nice to be able to do so with minimal damage.
Tools that are mostly text or have text interfaces? Greatly improved by LLM.
So all of those rich multimedia and their players/editors really need to add text representations.
When I first started using Linux I used to make fun of people who were stuck on the command line, but now pretty much everything I do is a command line program (using NeoVim and tmux).
[1] Yes, obviously with updates but the point more or less still stands.
It is amazing what we can do with a few strings of symbols, thanks to the fact that we all learn to decode them almost for free.
The oldest and most important technology indeed.
- I want to learn how to climb rock walls
- I want to learn how to throw a baseball
- I want to learn how to do public speaking
- I want to learn how to play piano
- I want to make a fire in the woods
- I want to understand the emotional impact of war
- I want to be involved in my child's life
In text format no less
Videos, podcasts... I have them transcribed because even though I like listening to music, podcasts are best written for speed of comprehension... (at least for me, I don't know about others).
Not sure why that is either - because I look at people extolling the virtues of podcasts, saying that they are able to multi task (eg. driving, walking, eat dinner), and still hear the message - which leaves me aghast
I had a 53 minute (each way) commute on the train, and I found it perfect for reading papers or learning skills - I was always amazed that the background noise would disappear and I could get lost in the text
Best study time ever.
white on dark grey with phosphor green around? not really.
I TOTALLY disagree on terminal being the best way
Even the text tablet shown is using 2D surface in its full ability - we need to strive to bring that as well
PS: 2014
It might be a good bet to bet on text, but it feels inefficient a lot of the time, especially in cases like this where all sorts of files are stored in JSON documents.
1: https://gist.github.com/simonw/007c628ceb84d0da0795b57af7b74...
2: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Dec/26/slop-acts-of-kindness/