There's No Such Thing As Plain Text • Dylan Beattie • YOW! 2023

This presentation was recorded at YOW! Australia 2023. #GOTOcon #YOW

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ABSTRACT
Software is complicated. Machine learning, microservice architectures, message queues… every few months there’s another revolutionary idea to consider, another framework to learn. And underneath so many of these amazing ideas and abstractions is text. When you work in software, you spend your life working with text. Some of those text files are source code, some are configuration files, some of them are documentation. Editors, revision control systems, programming languages - everything from C# and HTML to Git and VS Code is based on the idea that we’re working with “plain text” files. But… what if I told you there’s no such thing?

When we say something is a plain text file, we’re relying on a huge number of assumptions - about operating systems, editors, file formats, language, culture, history… and, most of the time, that’s OK. But when it goes wrong, good old plain text can lead to some of the weirdest bugs you’ve ever seen. Why is there Chinese in the SQL event logs? Why has the city of Aarhus disappeared? And why does Magnus Mårtensson always have trouble getting into the USA?

Join Dylan Beattie for a fascinating look into the hidden world of text files - from the history of mechanical teletypes, to how emoji skin tones actually work. We’ll look at some memorable bugs, some golden rules for working with plain text, and we’ll find out what the phrase “PIKE MATCHBOX” has to do with driving in the Soviet Union. [...]

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#PlainText #Programming #SoftwareEngineering #ComputerScience #PIKEMATCHBOX #DylanBeattie #ASCII #ASCIIart #IEEE #YOWcon

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[HtotheG]

Every talk i watch by Dylan has been absolutely amazing. I love being a certified Rockstar developer and the fun you bring to coding! This one especially made me think about all the considerations that go into text and other seemingly simple things we use everyday. I knew time zones were a mess but when every alphabet past, present, and future is involved, hats off to Unicode and the UTF-8 standard. Keep up the great talks! 😁

[lagcisco]

Thanks for Making this topic interesting for us

[akirachisaka]

I do really wish Dylan talks more about CJK stuff. The Chinese, Japanese, and Korean characters.
Like, I guess it’s a bit outside of the scope of this talk? But things like Han Unification is super interesting.

[SoulcatcherLucario]

not sure if dylan will see this, but i think a possible reason why not all of the greek alphabet was added to codepage 437 was also due to the fact that greek at that time still had a fair amount of diacritic marks (even if they didn't do anything anymore), so it would have been harder than just adding a few more letters.

[GeorgeMonsour]

Give this guy a talk show! He's so much better than the Spotify or pot fuelled 'talking' heads out there. Just give him the radio station for that matter! We'd lose a good programmer but AI is gonna need an overlord anyway. I nominate Dylan for overlord! ;-)

[goldnutter]

6:21 wait wait wait handbrake..

What if the line starts on the right 😜BUGGER ! the end of the line is the left and I just tricked myself with data, again, as we do🤣
Information ? no no sir. That doesn't have a physical form. We should read that word as "structured data"
"HOW STRUCTURED MATE ?"

[allanwind]

SMTP Service Extension for 8bit-MIMEtransport (July 1994). Per wikipedia "virtually all modern mail relays are 8-bit clean."

[goldnutter]

3:07 (IYKYK)

Is that a PUTTER in your sentence or are you just driving today
I'm sorry sir, the actual joke is that golf is a driver, a hole, and le flag

Great talk but you should leave politics out of software.

[SteinGauslaaStrindhaug]

2:22 Ah, yes that's the kind of comments I sometimes write when I'm on vacation or don't have a project at work and I start to comment on something late at night after my ADHD meds has worn off. 😅

...though this is still split into 3 paragraphs, to me that would indicate it's still early in the evening so the meds, have still some effect... On the other hand; I now see that it's edited, so those 4 line breaks might have been added afterwards, as an afterthought ... when you realise that a screen full of text probably should probably be more than one large paragraph.

(I got to stop writing now before I write an equally crazy comment... I think I forgot to take my afternoon Ritalin today...)