Always Bet on Text (2014)

As usual, context matters. If you're trying to convey complex thoughts about abstract matters, then language is the way to do it. If you are trying to convey deep emotional states, then a photo or video is probably better. You cannot convert the 1st amendment into photos, and you cannot convert the Mona Lisa smile into words. Just try to use words to describe either of these photos and see how they fall short: https://img.buzzfeed.com/buzzfeed-static/static/2015-10/19/1…

People can read much faster than they can speak, and they can google a new words. You can Ctrl+F arbitraly big text files for keywords. Good luck with doing the same with 2-hours-long video file or mp3. You will need to listen to the whole thing. That's what annoys me about the new trend to do tutorials as video. You can easily diff text. Text works with version control systems. Text works with unix command line tools. You can trivialy…

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I have mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, I agree: text is infinitely versatile, indexable, durable, etc. But, after discovering Bret Victor's work[1], and thinking about how I learned piano, I've also started to see a lot of the limitations of text. When I learned piano, I always had a live feedback loop: play a note, and hear how it sounds, and every week I had a teacher coach me. This is a completely different way to learn…