[userbinator]

It's not hard to read what isn't "human readable" anyway; it just takes a little bit of practice and learning. For example, I can "sight-read" x86 and Z80 Asm from a hexdump, and bits of ASN.1 and a few other proprietary protocols too.

[userbinator]

Did I strike a nerve? It's unfortunate that so many seem to be under the impression that "human readable" is really an euphemism for "like English" and are narrow/closed-minded enough to not consider the possibility that people can learn just about any language with enough exposure and a bit of effort.

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[hyperpape]

You didn’t strike a nerve, but your comment is misguided.

Of course people can read binary formats. It is just that they read them more slowly, and it requires quite a bit of exposure/practice, so that people usually invest in tooling to simplify the process.

I suggest that when you see a comment like this, you ask yourself “if I change ‘human readable’ to ‘easily human readable’ would I need to offer my correction?”

[code_biologist]

Your comment comes across the same way as that long ago "Show HN" where somebody said that Dropbox is pretty much just rsync.