Tangential to the actual point of the post, but the talk "Plain text? Really?" by Dylan Beattie[1] is one of my favorite talks. It does a great job capturing the problems with something that "seems" so simple. I think the author of the blog is well aware of these, though :)

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_mZBa3sqTrI

@dang @tomhow

My understanding is that HN has started incorporating AI tooling in the back-end to scan for LLM-generated submissions and source content, in an effort to discourage it and encourage human-made content (with human discussions, one would hope). Why do we keep having these kinds of articles every day? Entire "apps" are generated - see the lighthouse one - and submitted, and are plain-as-day LLM-generated nonsense.

Anyway, flagged.

Graydon Hoare, the creator of the Rust programming language, wrote his seminal piece on text in 2014. In it, he said "text is the most powerful, useful, effective communication technology ever, period."[1] Text is durable.

[1] https://archive.ph/FhG5L (the original either got deleted or login-walled, here is the archived version)

[2] https://hn.algolia.com/?q=always+bet+on+text

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26164001

[4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8451271

[5] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10284202

[6] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12815829

This is the public dividend of a standard finally winning. The article gives credit to Unicode, but it is the fact that ASCII unambiguously won that gives plain text its portability and longevity. It looks like Unicode is on its way to winning in the same way, but it is not there yet. Most text files I write are still pure ASCII because that's the only way to avoid unexpected glitches [0].

[0] Windows newlines not withstanding.

I feel obligated to mention ledger[0] and hledger[1], those are plain text accounting software, well, as you can guess from their names, they allow you to do personal accounting in plain text.

0: https://ledger-cli.org/ 1: https://hledger.org

that's why gno.land contracts render to markdown as the standard. you can browse the world through your terminal.

imagine the world wide web but markdown (and decentralized). gno.land is that.

Fun timing on this plaintext conversation. I built a little browser based plaintext playwriting app this weekend for a little weekend project. Found myself really hating 1. how clunk screenwriting software can be and 2. How unsharable the files are.

With plaintext you can hand the file off to anyone on any device--the caveat being absolutely no one wants to be handed a plaintext script. The software I used ten years ago to write plays is long since deprecated and those files are basically unopenable. Plaintext however remains.