6 ms·

this is an evil take but i think emojis are massively, massively underrated for use in signaling information (and massively overused in git readmes) A grimacin

this is an evil take but i think emojis are massively, massively underrated for use in signaling information (and massively overused in git readmes) A grimacing emoji when a process is thrashing, a fire emoji when it's eating CPU, a sweating smile emoji when the process is running longer than expected, etc etc etc. It sounds dystopian in a way but also useful - neat seeing them used here!

AnimalMuppet 2y ago
More dystopian (and maybe more useful): A roll-eyes emoji when you're asking it to do something stupid. (It's more dystopian, because the computer has to know when you're asking it to do something stupid. Even more dystopian: It gives you the roll-eyes when you ask it to do something that it doesn't want to do.)
leononame 2y ago
Personally, I disagree. I'm probably in the minority, but emojis don't helot me much when conveying information and I see them more as visual clutter that makes it difficult to distinguish what's going on. This is especially the case when there are a lot of emojis (or other icons for that matter) instead of text, e.g. in menus. It makes it much harder for me to distill the information and it takes me longer to grok what's going on. Maybe I'm just a less visual type than others, but emojis actively make my experience worse. I like them in chat though. Edit: to clarify, e.g. the process list makes it harder for me, because there are emojis on every process. I'd find it a tad more helpful if there were only emojis on processes with events and healthy processes would just have nothing (like the hourglass only being present in some processes). Color coding the background also makes it much more difficult to distinguish the emojis for me.
- colechristensen 2y ago
  The young will use and understand them much more. How many years will it be before the Oxford English Dictionary begins listing definitions for individual and groups of emoji? In 100 years they will just be an ordinary feature of language somewhere between a word and a punctuation mark.
  - acheron 2y ago
    "What are letters?" "Kinda like mediaglyphs except they're all black, and they're tiny, they don't move, they're old and boring and really hard to read." -- The Diamond Age (Neal Stephenson)
    - ang_cire 2y ago
      How would they have learned a contraction if everything is based on glyphs/ images?
      - DEADMINCE 2y ago
        Because it wasn't always.
      - colechristensen 2y ago
        Plenty of words are contractions or otherwise combinations of other words that you don't know about unless you're particularly interested in language. "Goodbye" = "God be with ye" for example You don't think "will not" when you say "won't", "won't" is just a word you use with a meaning you understand long before you can write.
        ang_cire 2y ago
        See my other comment below, but all the things you're talking about work because English has a phonetic alphabet. You can break 'be with ye' into 'b', 'y', and 'e', and drop the rest. In languages like Chinese which do not have a phonetic writing system, you cannot drop individual sounds within a word/character in a rule-based way like contractions. Emojis are not a phonetic system, so unless you created an emoji for "they're", separate from the emojis for "they" and "are", you wouldn't have it as a word.
      - thfuran 2y ago
        You don't need to know how to write to speak.
- deredede 2y ago
  Yeah, emoji on top of color is redundant and less legible. I find that people that use emojis for dashboards and the like tend to overuse them, but I agree with GP in that a single (well aligned and on an adequately colored background for contrast) emoji per item can convey a lot of info quite efficiently.
- thfuran 2y ago
  There are also occasionally significant visual differences between the platforms. Like, a squirt gun and a handgun just aren't the same thing.
- julianeon 2y ago
  Incidentally in Slack you can easily set up a workflow where "emoji response -> text macro" (aka more information, a text supplement to your emoji). Very useful if you have a Slack channel that is deluged with questions.
  - fragmede 2y ago
    reactj to create jira tickets, kick off PRs/builds/etc are the unsung workflow heros of slack
- Levitz 2y ago
  Not to mention, they don't translate well to spoken word and are not easy to type on a keyboard either. "Why is svchost panting sweating red emoji CPU usage" is as stupid as it sounds.
- necovek 2y ago
  > I like them in chat though. I personally don't like them in chat too much either: I much prefer ":)" or ":(" or ";)" than actual visual it gets turned into — emojis being so colorful call the attention to them, whereas I simply want to signal the tone in a message — emoticon/emoji is not the core of the message unless that's the only thing I put out. But I am trying to go with the times (not that I had much choice as typing regular emoticons usually gets converted into emojis these days).
UI_at_80x24 2y ago
Yes and No. Many years ago I built an elaborate dashboard/status page that was a front-end for a dozen or so CLI processes that did the heavy lifting for our video->VR->CDN->website->SEO link farm. I used very simple "error codes" to flag when/where in the process errors would happen. 5 shapes, 5 colours, and 1-5 in numbers Square, Star, Circle, Triangle, Exclamation mark. Black, Blue, Grey, Yellow, Red 1,2,3,4,5 Different people/departments would be check on different aspects of deployment. This prevented the glassy eyed blank stares when I would ask: What was the error code. Me and the other IT folks knew what each stage meant, along with the colour codes and severity number would allow us to pinpoint where in the process this happened. So this was a form of emojii, and it was VERY helpful. I would have preferred error codes/server number/step number but Bob in Marketing would just ignore that. He never could remember 'what it said'. But he always remembered "Red Square and #5" Symbols that are __EASY__ to identify (especially when attention spans are short) are tremendously helpful. [See Traffic signs as an example] Esoteric symbols that can change meaning and/or have no meaning in the context are HORRIBLE. I'm on the spectrum, I can't tell what any "face emojii" mean.
- mr_mitm 2y ago
  > I'm on the spectrum, I can't tell what any "face emojii" mean. Then again, about 3% of all people are color blind.
  - drfreckles 2y ago
    That's precisely why I added emojis. In early versions of the game, the starvation levels were only represented by colors.
- xmprt 2y ago
  The problem is that symbols are also easy to misremembered or misidentified. It's easy to identify a red square but if Bob accidentally recalls a blue square or a red triangle, then all of a sudden you're looking for an error that didn't happen.
ravenstine 2y ago
Emojis can be done properly. Infrequent use with good contextual positioning can break a person's preoccupation and direct their attention when it counts. Poor utilization of emojis, put simply, is using them all the time in ways that don't actually enhance the attention or meaning of the surrounding text. The problem with emojis is people like them too much, and I have little faith that they would be used wisely by most programmers if some influential figure like Uncle Bub Martin told everyone to start using emojis for all the things.
reidjs 2y ago
Agree, especially for conveying tone, eg, happy, frustration, danger, etc, especially in dialog. There is an art to using them to enhance a message instead of obscuring it, though.
duxup 2y ago
When used thoughtfully, I find my clients love emojis on some things and they seem to work better than many web icons. Warning Emoji, a weight, phone emoji ... people see them every day and understand them immediately. https://emojipedia.org/warning https://emojipedia.org/warning Granted silly emojis, those that imply other things, eggplant. Not so much. And the burrito is just for developer type stuff.
deadbabe 2y ago
Emojis are incredible for variable names in code, it solves the hard problem of naming things.
- thfuran 2y ago
  Most importantly, they help make code easier to read than to write.
  - deadbabe 2y ago
    omg yes
  - lmm 2y ago
    Those who forget APL are doomed to reinvent it, poorly.
devmor 2y ago
Emojis are great for conveying the wide and varied levels of human emotion that differ from person to person that may type the same exact sentence with an entirely different meaning. This is especially true when you have repeated communications with someone and come to understand how and when they use certain emojis. For this same reason, I don't think they are great for technical information. They feel antithetical to the purpose of conveying exact information. You can use them as iconography, but purpose-made iconography is still superior, in my view.
scubbo 2y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernoff_face https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernoff_face supports your take - humans are hard-wired to recognize and parse faces, why wouldn't we make use of that shortcut!?
bitwize 2y ago
cdparanoia used to use ASCII emoticons as status indicators -- :-) for when things were going well for instance.
nvartolomei 2y ago
You’ll love to learn more about Chernoff faces! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernoff_face https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernoff_face
quectophoton 2y ago
My reaction: :skull_emoji: :skull_emoji: :skull_emoji: > a fire emoji when it's eating CPU Fire emoji obviously signals that everything is going nice and smooth tho. > etc etc etc. Or the bottom/submissive emoji when you're in root/privileged mode. Or the ok_hand emoji when there's something wrong (see ASL, and also The Expanse). /s

AnimalMuppet 2y ago

More dystopian (and maybe more useful): A roll-eyes emoji when you're asking it to do something stupid. (It's more dystopian, because the computer has to know when you're asking it to do something stupid. Even more dystopian: It gives you the roll-eyes when you ask it to do something that it doesn't want to do.)

leononame 2y ago

Personally, I disagree. I'm probably in the minority, but emojis don't helot me much when conveying information and I see them more as visual clutter that makes it difficult to distinguish what's going on. This is especially the case when there are a lot of emojis (or other icons for that matter) instead of text, e.g. in menus. It makes it much harder for me to distill the information and it takes me longer to grok what's going on. Maybe I'm just a less visual type than others, but emojis actively make my experience worse. I like them in chat though. Edit: to clarify, e.g. the process list makes it harder for me, because there are emojis on every process. I'd find it a tad more helpful if there were only emojis on processes with events and healthy processes would just have nothing (like the hourglass only being present in some processes). Color coding the background also makes it much more difficult to distinguish the emojis for me.

colechristensen 2y ago
The young will use and understand them much more. How many years will it be before the Oxford English Dictionary begins listing definitions for individual and groups of emoji? In 100 years they will just be an ordinary feature of language somewhere between a word and a punctuation mark.
- acheron 2y ago
  "What are letters?" "Kinda like mediaglyphs except they're all black, and they're tiny, they don't move, they're old and boring and really hard to read." -- The Diamond Age (Neal Stephenson)
  - ang_cire 2y ago
    How would they have learned a contraction if everything is based on glyphs/ images?
    - DEADMINCE 2y ago
      Because it wasn't always.
    - colechristensen 2y ago
      Plenty of words are contractions or otherwise combinations of other words that you don't know about unless you're particularly interested in language. "Goodbye" = "God be with ye" for example You don't think "will not" when you say "won't", "won't" is just a word you use with a meaning you understand long before you can write.
      - ang_cire 2y ago
        See my other comment below, but all the things you're talking about work because English has a phonetic alphabet. You can break 'be with ye' into 'b', 'y', and 'e', and drop the rest. In languages like Chinese which do not have a phonetic writing system, you cannot drop individual sounds within a word/character in a rule-based way like contractions. Emojis are not a phonetic system, so unless you created an emoji for "they're", separate from the emojis for "they" and "are", you wouldn't have it as a word.
    - thfuran 2y ago
      You don't need to know how to write to speak.
deredede 2y ago
Yeah, emoji on top of color is redundant and less legible. I find that people that use emojis for dashboards and the like tend to overuse them, but I agree with GP in that a single (well aligned and on an adequately colored background for contrast) emoji per item can convey a lot of info quite efficiently.
thfuran 2y ago
There are also occasionally significant visual differences between the platforms. Like, a squirt gun and a handgun just aren't the same thing.
julianeon 2y ago
Incidentally in Slack you can easily set up a workflow where "emoji response -> text macro" (aka more information, a text supplement to your emoji). Very useful if you have a Slack channel that is deluged with questions.
- fragmede 2y ago
  reactj to create jira tickets, kick off PRs/builds/etc are the unsung workflow heros of slack
Levitz 2y ago
Not to mention, they don't translate well to spoken word and are not easy to type on a keyboard either. "Why is svchost panting sweating red emoji CPU usage" is as stupid as it sounds.
necovek 2y ago
> I like them in chat though. I personally don't like them in chat too much either: I much prefer ":)" or ":(" or ";)" than actual visual it gets turned into — emojis being so colorful call the attention to them, whereas I simply want to signal the tone in a message — emoticon/emoji is not the core of the message unless that's the only thing I put out. But I am trying to go with the times (not that I had much choice as typing regular emoticons usually gets converted into emojis these days).

UI_at_80x24 2y ago

Yes and No. Many years ago I built an elaborate dashboard/status page that was a front-end for a dozen or so CLI processes that did the heavy lifting for our video->VR->CDN->website->SEO link farm. I used very simple "error codes" to flag when/where in the process errors would happen. 5 shapes, 5 colours, and 1-5 in numbers Square, Star, Circle, Triangle, Exclamation mark. Black, Blue, Grey, Yellow, Red 1,2,3,4,5 Different people/departments would be check on different aspects of deployment. This prevented the glassy eyed blank stares when I would ask: What was the error code. Me and the other IT folks knew what each stage meant, along with the colour codes and severity number would allow us to pinpoint where in the process this happened. So this was a form of emojii, and it was VERY helpful. I would have preferred error codes/server number/step number but Bob in Marketing would just ignore that. He never could remember 'what it said'. But he always remembered "Red Square and #5" Symbols that are __EASY__ to identify (especially when attention spans are short) are tremendously helpful. [See Traffic signs as an example] Esoteric symbols that can change meaning and/or have no meaning in the context are HORRIBLE. I'm on the spectrum, I can't tell what any "face emojii" mean.

mr_mitm 2y ago
> I'm on the spectrum, I can't tell what any "face emojii" mean. Then again, about 3% of all people are color blind.
- drfreckles 2y ago
  That's precisely why I added emojis. In early versions of the game, the starvation levels were only represented by colors.
xmprt 2y ago
The problem is that symbols are also easy to misremembered or misidentified. It's easy to identify a red square but if Bob accidentally recalls a blue square or a red triangle, then all of a sudden you're looking for an error that didn't happen.

ravenstine 2y ago

Emojis can be done properly. Infrequent use with good contextual positioning can break a person's preoccupation and direct their attention when it counts. Poor utilization of emojis, put simply, is using them all the time in ways that don't actually enhance the attention or meaning of the surrounding text. The problem with emojis is people like them too much, and I have little faith that they would be used wisely by most programmers if some influential figure like Uncle Bub Martin told everyone to start using emojis for all the things.

reidjs 2y ago

Agree, especially for conveying tone, eg, happy, frustration, danger, etc, especially in dialog. There is an art to using them to enhance a message instead of obscuring it, though.

duxup 2y ago

When used thoughtfully, I find my clients love emojis on some things and they seem to work better than many web icons. Warning Emoji, a weight, phone emoji ... people see them every day and understand them immediately. https://emojipedia.org/warning https://emojipedia.org/warning Granted silly emojis, those that imply other things, eggplant. Not so much. And the burrito is just for developer type stuff.

deadbabe 2y ago

Emojis are incredible for variable names in code, it solves the hard problem of naming things.

thfuran 2y ago
Most importantly, they help make code easier to read than to write.
- deadbabe 2y ago
  omg yes
- lmm 2y ago
  Those who forget APL are doomed to reinvent it, poorly.

devmor 2y ago

Emojis are great for conveying the wide and varied levels of human emotion that differ from person to person that may type the same exact sentence with an entirely different meaning. This is especially true when you have repeated communications with someone and come to understand how and when they use certain emojis. For this same reason, I don't think they are great for technical information. They feel antithetical to the purpose of conveying exact information. You can use them as iconography, but purpose-made iconography is still superior, in my view.

scubbo 2y ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernoff_face https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernoff_face supports your take - humans are hard-wired to recognize and parse faces, why wouldn't we make use of that shortcut!?

bitwize 2y ago

cdparanoia used to use ASCII emoticons as status indicators -- :-) for when things were going well for instance.

nvartolomei 2y ago

You’ll love to learn more about Chernoff faces! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernoff_face https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernoff_face

quectophoton 2y ago

My reaction: :skull_emoji: :skull_emoji: :skull_emoji: > a fire emoji when it's eating CPU Fire emoji obviously signals that everything is going nice and smooth tho. > etc etc etc. Or the bottom/submissive emoji when you're in root/privileged mode. Or the ok_hand emoji when there's something wrong (see ASL, and also The Expanse). /s