I often see a serial number on a device and take a photo rather than typing on a phone keyboard. Or use software which blocks clipboard functionality and take a

I often see a serial number on a device and take a photo rather than typing on a phone keyboard. Or use software which blocks clipboard functionality and take a screenshot instead of typing it out, yes. OneNote does character recognition on all images and makes them searchable. If a doorbell or key safe has a keypad and I need my computer to look up the code, what difference does it make if the code is text or photo of scribble? Because one day my computer might forget how to open bitmap files? How likely is that? The safe will have turned to dust before all software which can read JPGs is lost to history). > "Plain text just works, everywhere, all the time." My point is not "text doesn't work", but it would be good if other things worked that well and there's no good reason why they can't. You don't eat plain oatmeal for every meal because it works, and shun restaurants because one day they might close. You don't plug your ears because you can read lyrics and sheet music and one day you might go deaf. This is like the "first class functions" of programming. Wanting first class functions is not saying that plain loops don't work, it's saying that more powerful things are desirable even if they aren't cross-language compatible.