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Comment by jedwhite | Hacker News Reader

There is a great chapter in The Pragmatic Programmer on why you should stick with text files for everything possible. Section 3 / Chapter 14 "The Power of Plain Text". It argues that as programmers, our base material as craftspeople isn't wood or metal, but knowledge, and with plain text we have the ability to manipulate knowledge with virtually every tool at our disposal.

http://www.amazon.com/Pragmatic-Programmer-Journeyman-Master...

This blog post doesn't express things nearly so well as the book, but the argument has validity.

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Interesting higher level questions arise from this -

Is it because we've built so many tools around text that text seems so powerful, or is it because text is powerful that we've built all these tools?

Knowledge is of the mind+brain+body+environs. Text is just data. Just as machine code is "just data" if you don't have a processor that "understands" it. Remember - it took 20 years to decipher the hieroglyphics on the rosetta stone. Also, good luck with storing images in plain text.

Moral of the story - don't get too attached to anything :)

If you can't and are paranoid about losing your digital stuff, maybe DSpace will help - http://www.dspace.org/

The blog post and his comment have nothing to do with backups. They point out the flexibility and human readability of text files, as they are used in numerous different formats (xml, yaml, html, ics, csv, sql, etc etc etc) which can be easily parsed.

Binary data isn't as easily human readable or parsable. Images can be stored in text when base64 encoded, or when a text-based image format is used, such as XPM (old hackers may remember using vi as their X11 image editor of choice, back in the day) and SVG.

DSpace is not about backups indeed. Its about problems like this one -

An acquaintance of mine has a true blue 5.25 inch "floppy" disk with text data of his research that he can't recover - 'cos the disk's format is inaccessible, the text is not in ASCII (probably EBCDIC), drives that read it aren't available now, the OS that knows the file system (CP/M I think) isn't available, the cpu that the OS ran on isn't available now .

I'll grant that you can recover it, but only with great difficulty - sort of a Rosetta problem.

It's an interesting question, but I think it can be answered by pointing out just how much effort we've put into trying to build tools around other forms of information. Audio Processing, Image Processing, have all come a long way but they're nowhere near as powerful as sed/grep/awk/etc.

I agree with you though, tools like netcat, ssh, and dd are super powerful without implying any kind of formatting Text works with these by virtue of being representable as a stream of bytes.

The Art of Unix Programming also has a section on why text trumps binary formats almost every time.

There's also a good chapter on self-documenting data formats in Jon Bentley's _More Programming Pearls_, and don't forget http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?PowerOfPlainText .

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