alt Hacker NewsCouldn't help riffing off on a tangent from the title (since the article is about diagramming tools)...
Dylan Beattie has a thought-provoking presentation for anyone who believes that "plain text" is a simple / solid substrate for computing: "There's no such thing as plain text" https://www.slideshare.net/slideshow/theres-no-such-thing-as... (you'll find many videos from different conferences)
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Nice. I've used the phrase before, with the vague notion that a proper talk must already exist.
I can't tell what the argument is just from the slideshow. The main point appears to be that code pages, UTF-16, etc are all "plain text" but not really.
If that really was the argument, then it is, in 2026, obsolete; utf-8 is everywhere.
I read that article long time ago, and for me it's a hard disagree. A system as complex and quirky as Unicode can never be considered "plain", and even today it is common for many apps that something Unicode-related breaks. ASCII is still the only text system that will really work well everywhere, which I consider a must for calling something plain text.
And yes, ASCII means mostly limiting things to English but for many environments that's almost expected. I would even defend this not being a native English speaker myself.
Haven't watched the videos yet, but from the slides, it looks like part of the issue he was talking about was encodings (there's a slide illustrating UTF-16LE ve UTF-16BE, for example). Thankfully, with UTF-8 becoming the default everywhere (so that you need a really good reason not to use it for any given document), we're back at "yes, there is such a thing as plain text" again. It has a much larger set of valid characters, but if you receive a text file without knowing its encoding, you can just assume it's UTF-8 and have a 99.7% chance of being right.
FINALLY.