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Why I love text files
- pavel_lishin 16y agoI look forward to his next post, "Why I love bits."
- stretchwithme 16y agoI think bytes are next. Then bits. Then the glory of square waves. Seriously, I can understand the fascination with something so fundamental to programming. I'm just surprised the favorite editor wasn't mentioned.
- heyrhett 16y agoHave I told you guys how much i love electrons lately?
- awakeasleep 16y agoSquare waves and electrons are seriously some of the most beautiful, incredible things. But for my money, how about logic? Why the hell do logical operators make sense, how have ideas with absolutely no physical basis taken a life of their own and woven all this magic around us?
- pavel_lishin 16y agoYou ought to read Stephenson's Anathem.
- stretchwithme 16y agoBlame Aristotle.
- sliverstorm 16y agoI usually think of logic as rigorously defined language, rather than built-up math. (Math being based in the physical world, and language being purely ephemeral) From that point of view, 'or' 'and' 'not' and 'xor' make perfect sense.
- sliverstorm 16y ago> I think bytes are next. Then bits. Then the glory of square waves. It's hard to really quite grasp just how crazy computers are without mucking about in some square waves for a few hours :)
- dctoedt 16y ago> I'm just surprised the favorite editor wasn't mentioned. It was, at least inferentially: Emacs.
- frou_dh 16y agoHe uses a text file for his TODO list so that mankind will be able to read it in 1000 years! I wish my work were that important. When I was younger and first using a computer, I would "Open with Notepad" all sorts of files to see if anything about the structure was readable. That's why I liked text files then, these days I like them because they are often indicators of the mindset of simplicity.
- al_james 16y agoAssuming they still use ASCII (or an ASCII extended character set) in those days.
- harpastum 16y agoAs long as people still use English (or letter-based languages), ASCII would be pretty straightforward to decipher — especially compared to a straight binary dump.
- sprout 16y agoActually he uses it, I imagine, so that he will be able to read it next year. I haven't even tried to use any todo apps, (the text file has always served me well) but what experience I have with proprietary formats is that they're a poor choice for storing data, since either they're poorly designed or the designer is constantly redesigning them and invalidating your data.
- frou_dh 16y agoThat's why the statement was doubly odd, because todos are pretty transient. I like Things for Mac myself because it automates repeating and scheduled todo items, and has a distinction between completable projects and areas of upkeep. A programmer can leave any time they want by processing its XML file.
- StavrosK 16y agoI'm sorry, I know one shouldn't criticise if it's not constructive, but this must be the piece with the largest text/content ratio I've ever read, and I've read a Stephen King novel.
- tspiteri 16y agoMaybe the author just loves text.
- meatsock 16y agowell you couldn't fit all of human knowledge in a text file like he claims, not to mention how hard it'd be to give it a proper filename.
- frou_dh 16y agoSpace Ruler Xzorganax, I present to you: misc.txt
- KC8ZKF 16y ago42.txt
- flipper 16y agoYou could create a text file called alpha2omega.txt, which contains the line: Look at the binary representation of pi; you'll find the sum of all human knowledge encoded there in ASCII, EBCDIC or any other code ever invented. You just need Google to index it all for you so it's useful.
- 16y ago
- techbio 16y agoText became what it is to me today after my first revelatory experiences with Linux/bash--something like being six years old and realizing the alphabet is all I ever need to describe anything and everything. Indescribable feeling.
- jedwhite 16y agoThere is a great chapter in The Pragmatic Programmer on why you should stick with text files for everything possible. Section 3 / Chapter 14 "The Power of Plain Text". It argues that as programmers, our base material as craftspeople isn't wood or metal, but knowledge, and with plain text we have the ability to manipulate knowledge with virtually every tool at our disposal. http://www.amazon.com/Pragmatic-Programmer-Journeyman-Master/dp/020161622X http://www.amazon.com/Pragmatic-Programmer-Journeyman-Master... This blog post doesn't express things nearly so well as the book, but the argument has validity.
- aufreak3 16y agoInteresting higher level questions arise from this - Is it because we've built so many tools around text that text seems so powerful, or is it because text is powerful that we've built all these tools? Knowledge is of the mind+brain+body+environs. Text is just data. Just as machine code is "just data" if you don't have a processor that "understands" it. Remember - it took 20 years to decipher the hieroglyphics on the rosetta stone. Also, good luck with storing images in plain text. Moral of the story - don't get too attached to anything :) If you can't and are paranoid about losing your digital stuff, maybe DSpace will help - http://www.dspace.org/ http://www.dspace.org/
- runjake 16y agoThe blog post and his comment have nothing to do with backups. They point out the flexibility and human readability of text files, as they are used in numerous different formats (xml, yaml, html, ics, csv, sql, etc etc etc) which can be easily parsed. Binary data isn't as easily human readable or parsable. Images can be stored in text when base64 encoded, or when a text-based image format is used, such as XPM (old hackers may remember using vi as their X11 image editor of choice, back in the day) and SVG.
- aufreak3 16y agoDSpace is not about backups indeed. Its about problems like this one - An acquaintance of mine has a true blue 5.25 inch "floppy" disk with text data of his research that he can't recover - 'cos the disk's format is inaccessible, the text is not in ASCII (probably EBCDIC), drives that read it aren't available now, the OS that knows the file system (CP/M I think) isn't available, the cpu that the OS ran on isn't available now . I'll grant that you can recover it, but only with great difficulty - sort of a Rosetta problem.
- dreaming 16y agoThe concept seems obvious, but it hasn't stopped a slow sapping of functionality and permutability of data in the face of 'easy to use' solely GUI based tools. To say nothing of the rather difficult task of automating software without a CLI component...
- TorKlingberg 16y agoGo ahead and use text files, but make sure you specify exactly what encoding is used. Saying it's "just plain text" is not enough. UTF-8 is fine and convenient, just make sure your code actually encodes/decodes it when it should.
- kleiba 16y agoFrom the quote at the end of the article: "The continued dominance of the command line among experts [...]" -- is that even true anymore? I certainly live in the shell, but looking at my younger co-workers who are in their 20's, they hardly ever use the command line. The IDE is the new command line, it seems.
- mdwrigh2 16y agoAs a young 20-something (20, actually, to be exact), I'd say that the best programmers I know still use the command line to a significant degree. Though we are small in number compared to the number of people who live in some IDE.
- frou_dh 16y agoI was under the impression that living in the IDE was only popular for certain languages (Java, C#, MSVC++, ...) Not necessarily a bad thing - I like using Visual Studio when doing C#.
- alnayyir 16y agoVirtually everyone at the startup I work for uses vim in a terminal. I don't, because while I know vim verbiage, I've never found it more productive than having a big fookin' screen with TextMate and some terminals floating around. I'd probably feel differently if I went back to working on Linux.
- Tycho 16y agoLove the design of that website.
- TedBlosser 16y agoi run my life off my todo.txt file as well. i also recently discovered the plaintext iphone app that syncs this to my dropbox - highly recommend it if you run your life out of txt docs too.