::scr Ramblings of a Classic Refugee or How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Love OS X

[David Cantrell]

On Tue, Feb 05, 2002 at 04:50:24PM +0000, Alaric Snell wrote:
> 1) The exact bit sequences used to express the fact that my email address is 
> alaric@alaric-snell.com, my web site is at http://www.alaric-snell.com/, and 
> I would like some pizza are surely only of minor importance to a programmer 
> working with this information

True in that case, but not true of all data.  To a games programmer, for
example, the exact bit-sequences that make up the colour coding for this
particular sprite are useful to know, as without that knowledge you can't
do cunning tricks with the palette to make sure sprites cross over each
other in visually pleasing ways.

>                               Encodings should be handled by I/O libraries, 
> dammit, not made into big complex towering bastards like XML that you can't 
> help but have to work with directly!

You mean that no-one has yet written the appropriate libraries to make it
easy.

> 2) Binary files are small and fast. Computer power and storage are not free. 
> Most places where I've worked have had to buy lots of servers to deal with 
> the load to their web sites. If they could shave 10% off of that, it'd be a 
> lot of money. Not enough to hire a programmer to re-code everything in 
> assembly, no, but enough to justify them using an efficient encoding library 
> instead of a messy one, all else equal.

Yes and no.  When you have division between operational people and
development people, which you really do need when you're big, it is
important that the ops people can grok exactly what the developers are
doing.  Easily editable formats provide this.  Especially when the
ops staff are on-call and having to fix things using nothing more than
a phone.  There's a delicate balancing act, and there is no universal
panacea, whether it be XML, plain-text, binary formats, or anything
else.

> 3) The benefits of being able to hand-edit data in Notepad are often 
> overstated.

and often understated.

>              There is nothing 'magically readable' about text; tools for 
> editing and viewing it just happen to come installed with the system instead 
> of having to be added.

The fact that those tools are universal do, in fact, make text universally
editable and viewable.  Yes, there's nothing inherent in the encoding, but
there is something inherent in the environment which makes this so.  The
argument that "you need software to read plain text" is therefore bogus.

>                        Big deal. PNG files are more 'readable' for large 2D 
> data sets than text anyway

Of course.  Choose the appropriate tool and the appropriate format for the
job.  Just bear in mind that execution speed is *not* the only criterion.

> In a text editor I can really easily screw up a data file...

You can really fuck things up with ANY tool.  Do not blame the tool for
your inadequacies.  Of course, it is possible to make tools which stop
you shooting yourself in the foot.  The price of that is frustration and
increased time, because they force you to work in prescribed ways.

-- 
David Cantrell | david@cantrell.org.uk | http://www.cantrell.org.uk/david

One person can change the world, but most of the time they shouldn't
    -- Marge Simpson