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by maxheadroom 2459 days 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).

1 comments

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.