That's been driving me absolutely bonkers. 🤣🤣
Discussion
Why are they numbers?
We like numbers.
This is why we are years in and still debating what a Kind 01 note is. Is it a tweet/microblog, a comment/reply, a generic/basic note ...?
What is a 01 note????????
Is it about non-english speakers?
Total guess. Just throwing it in there lol. I shouldn't comment on this lolol but here I am
But they almost all program in English. And if you can't read the letters, you can still just copy the word as a string.
I mean, it could just be a nonsense string, right, or a foreign word, or some sort of combo string like tweetstat03. It doesn't have to make any sense.
Yeah true. I just wanted to guess lol
Good guess. 😂
But the reason why I see it as a problem is that numbers imply order and these don't have any particular order, once you get past 00 and 01.
But the ordering of numbers allows a dev to just reserve 6000-10000, and come up with some harebrained scheme were he uses kind numbers as counters, or something.
And numbers are more limited because they're fewer characters to combine. You can get more combinations out of a short string than a long integer. That's why our keys contain letters.
So, no upside, but some downside.
using letters thins out the possible meaningful namespace, but 32 bits human readable has been a tradition for a long time, macOS has used this format for file type magics forever and i've also used this format in my own binary encodings
totally there would be a way to compress them into a single number meaningfully, probably you could even have them as long as 6 characters and have almost no collisions just by simply summing the ascii code of each letter, and you can compress it further by allowing 3-6 instead of all 6
Life in the background!