“The palest ink is still better than the best memory.”
Plain text isn’t something I thought had much application outside of keeping brief notes in Notepad during a phone call. The formatting was as the user defined it, and it wasn’t as fancy to present as something in Word.
The Pragmatic Programmer (which is written entirely in plain text as mentioned today) describes plain text as the most powerful store of knowledge due to its simplicity.
One of the biggest benefits from storing data in plain text is that “every tool in the computing universe” can operate solely on plain text. This means that even legacy systems from decades ago can be accessed and interacted with from just plain commands.
That being said, one of the critical features of this storage is making it human-readable and self-describing: the data should be as detached from the system that created it as possible:
“Human-readable forms of data, and self-describing data, will outlive all other forms of data and the applications that created them. Period. As long as the data survives, you will have a chance to be able to use it — potentially long after the original application that wrote it is defunct.”
Thank you for reading! If it helped, drop a like and come back next week :)
#PathToSWE
