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We've seen some interactive education projects on HN (the famous page on raytracing, the one where there's everything about curves, many audio-based projects) a

We've seen some interactive education projects on HN (the famous page on raytracing, the one where there's everything about curves, many audio-based projects) and they have had great reception. I think the reason why most devs still prefer plain-text resources over anything else is two-fold: interactive stuff tends to be less standard (because there isn't really a good standard for it) and harder to version than text, but also for interactive education/documentation tools to be accepted, they need to meet a certain high bar of quality, otherwise they are just eye-candy with insufficient value-add. When developing such tools, I believe there is a point of immersion after which they clearly become superior to text materials to most people including otherwise text-heavy devs, but if an author of such interactive tool fails to reach this level, their work is seen as a distraction, because you still need to refer elsewhere. Stack Overflow's documentation examples (as much as I really wished the initiative would succeed) were very far from reaching this bar. They were not organized well, lackluster and were not interactive enough either.

maxheadroom 7y ago
>I think the reason why most devs still prefer plain-text resources over anything else is... I think you missed a vital reason and that is portability and sharability. No one needs to install anything special to read or edit a text file. It's the digital equivalent of paper and pen when you think about it and that makes it a popular platform for everyone to be able to consume it. Plus, back when we were all old and dinosaurs roamed the Earth, the text file was the lightest/smallest way to transfer data (read: ideas) between computers. The practice/behaviour saturated the industry so much that many readmes of today are still on text files. Maybe there's a correlation to the real world, where we're definitely more apt to consume mediums that don't have superfluous data points than the words/ideas that they're meant to convey? Maybe I'm just talking out of my ass? Either way, plain-text resources are the easiest to create, share, and consume because there's almost a universality in the standard for text files (except the EOL and CRLF but that's more of an inconvenience than anything).
- tomashubelbauer 7y ago
  This is what I meant by standardization but I used a wrong term. I completely agree with you. At the basis, there will always need to be plain text, which should result in a wide variety of viewers and editors becoming available. In order for interactive visualizations to succeed among software devs, they can't be a SaaS, they need to become a part of the plumbing.

maxheadroom 7y ago

>I think the reason why most devs still prefer plain-text resources over anything else is... I think you missed a vital reason and that is portability and sharability. No one needs to install anything special to read or edit a text file. It's the digital equivalent of paper and pen when you think about it and that makes it a popular platform for everyone to be able to consume it. Plus, back when we were all old and dinosaurs roamed the Earth, the text file was the lightest/smallest way to transfer data (read: ideas) between computers. The practice/behaviour saturated the industry so much that many readmes of today are still on text files. Maybe there's a correlation to the real world, where we're definitely more apt to consume mediums that don't have superfluous data points than the words/ideas that they're meant to convey? Maybe I'm just talking out of my ass? Either way, plain-text resources are the easiest to create, share, and consume because there's almost a universality in the standard for text files (except the EOL and CRLF but that's more of an inconvenience than anything).

tomashubelbauer 7y ago
This is what I meant by standardization but I used a wrong term. I completely agree with you. At the basis, there will always need to be plain text, which should result in a wide variety of viewers and editors becoming available. In order for interactive visualizations to succeed among software devs, they can't be a SaaS, they need to become a part of the plumbing.