In the HN people always complain that geocode systems are hard to remember and/or write and praise "readable" or "memorable" systems like what3words. I'm of cou

In the HN people always complain that geocode systems are hard to remember and/or write and praise "readable" or "memorable" systems like what3words. I'm of course a strong opponent to what3words for various grounds, but more importantly geocode systems do not necessarily have to be human-friendly. I think geocodes should be compared to ZIP codes, not something else. They both mainly act as a machine-readable version of (approximated or more accurate) human-readable addresses. No one complain about ZIP (or ZIP+4) codes being numeral. They do not, nor can't, replace human-readable addresses---even the most accurate geocodes will require a room number or a PO box number to be the true replacement (unless you are comfortable about calculating three-dimensional WGS 84 coordinates with 10cm accuracy and forcing poor post carriers to resolve them :-). They might have to be verbally communicated for the short period of time, so shorter, verbally distinguishable, verifiable codes do help, but that's not the biggest concern. If we already have ZIP codes, why do we need another system(s)? It certainly helps that: - Geocodes can be automatically generated from (now universal) WGS 84 coordinates. - Geocodes, once their algorithm is fixed, never change. - Many geocodes offer a trade-off between the length and accuracy. Moreover, this trade-off is generally predictable. - Some geocodes can be shortened and accurately recovered with the context (country or city). In this regard, after having seen a lot of alternatives, I do think plus codes are close to being optimal. But it should be mentioned that their applications are always limited to what ZIP codes and human-readable addresses can't and geocodes can. (Mongol Post's adoption of what3words is special because there is no permanent human-readable addresses for many mobile settlements. But what3words is not superior to other geocodes in this particular application.)