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This argument always sounds superficial to me. 1) You can have corruption in files of any type. Text is no more robust to random bit flips. Pick a file format

This argument always sounds superficial to me. 1) You can have corruption in files of any type. Text is no more robust to random bit flips. Pick a file format and there are often tools that can isolate the corruption to a small portion to recover everything else. 2) The solution to lock-in is not "let's make everything text", but "let's have open file formats". Many types of data, especially for project-management-like tools, aren't particularly well suited as plain text (or a markdown format). So many extra unnecessary parsing/regex steps have to be jumped through for the program to use it, and the sanitizing functions now have to be moved from code to the user's brain to not break things. By all means, support open file formats and exporting functionality. But shoehorning -everything- into text sounds like some crazy mix of bikeshedding and worldbuilding. Why waste your time? Especially knowing MD will fall out of favor eventually, and a new format du jour will rise. What will you do then?

pmarreck 5y ago
> Text is no more robust to random bit flips Erm, a single bitflip will ruin, at maximum, a single character, which probably has enough context around it to be easily manually repaired. Not so pretty much any compressed, encrypted or binary format... either a large chunk of it gets undecodable or the whole thing is lost.
- something98 5y ago
  Not universally true. But, regardless, most files are not text.
  - OtomotO 5y ago
    > But, regardless, most files are not text Hence the initial post. (Are we running in circles now?)
    - something98 5y ago
      I'm pointing out that everyone is comfortable with most files not being human-readable. And that it's a red herring to suggest that text is the longest-lived format. I'm sure my data could outlive text files if I "stored" it on granite blocks, but it's not very useful in that format. Same with plain text; it just isn't a very useful format.
      - lytex 5y ago
        I think this web is quite revealing: https://plain-text.co/#the-office-model-and-the-engineering-model https://plain-text.co/#the-office-model-and-the-engineering-... https://plain-text.co/#two-revolutions-in-computing https://plain-text.co/#two-revolutions-in-computing It boils down to a tradeoff of learning your tools while retaining full control vs use apps that abstract away complexity by giving up control. If your work needs some strict technical requisite (reproducibility for example, or any other of the -ilities in software engineering), you need to have the control to tweak your tools so that you ensure it (Engineering Model, plain text files), but mostly is not needed so you can get away with working in the Office Model (binary files)

pmarreck 5y ago

> Text is no more robust to random bit flips Erm, a single bitflip will ruin, at maximum, a single character, which probably has enough context around it to be easily manually repaired. Not so pretty much any compressed, encrypted or binary format... either a large chunk of it gets undecodable or the whole thing is lost.

something98 5y ago
Not universally true. But, regardless, most files are not text.
- OtomotO 5y ago
  > But, regardless, most files are not text Hence the initial post. (Are we running in circles now?)
  - something98 5y ago
    I'm pointing out that everyone is comfortable with most files not being human-readable. And that it's a red herring to suggest that text is the longest-lived format. I'm sure my data could outlive text files if I "stored" it on granite blocks, but it's not very useful in that format. Same with plain text; it just isn't a very useful format.
    - lytex 5y ago
      I think this web is quite revealing: https://plain-text.co/#the-office-model-and-the-engineering-model https://plain-text.co/#the-office-model-and-the-engineering-... https://plain-text.co/#two-revolutions-in-computing https://plain-text.co/#two-revolutions-in-computing It boils down to a tradeoff of learning your tools while retaining full control vs use apps that abstract away complexity by giving up control. If your work needs some strict technical requisite (reproducibility for example, or any other of the -ilities in software engineering), you need to have the control to tweak your tools so that you ensure it (Engineering Model, plain text files), but mostly is not needed so you can get away with working in the Office Model (binary files)