[dontupvoteme]

this is an evil take but i think emojis are massively, massively underrated for use in signaling information (and massively overused in git readmes)

A grimacing emoji when a process is thrashing, a fire emoji when it's eating CPU, a sweating smile emoji when the process is running longer than expected, etc etc etc.

It sounds dystopian in a way but also useful - neat seeing them used here!

[leononame]

Personally, I disagree. I'm probably in the minority, but emojis don't helot me much when conveying information and I see them more as visual clutter that makes it difficult to distinguish what's going on. This is especially the case when there are a lot of emojis (or other icons for that matter) instead of text, e.g. in menus. It makes it much harder for me to distill the information and it takes me longer to grok what's going on. Maybe I'm just a less visual type than others, but emojis actively make my experience worse.

I like them in chat though.

Edit: to clarify, e.g. the process list makes it harder for me, because there are emojis on every process. I'd find it a tad more helpful if there were only emojis on processes with events and healthy processes would just have nothing (like the hourglass only being present in some processes). Color coding the background also makes it much more difficult to distinguish the emojis for me.

[Levitz]

Not to mention, they don't translate well to spoken word and are not easy to type on a keyboard either. "Why is svchost panting sweating red emoji CPU usage" is as stupid as it sounds.

[necovek]

> I like them in chat though.

I personally don't like them in chat too much either: I much prefer ":)" or ":(" or ";)" than actual visual it gets turned into — emojis being so colorful call the attention to them, whereas I simply want to signal the tone in a message — emoticon/emoji is not the core of the message unless that's the only thing I put out.

But I am trying to go with the times (not that I had much choice as typing regular emoticons usually gets converted into emojis these days).

[colechristensen]

The young will use and understand them much more.

How many years will it be before the Oxford English Dictionary begins listing definitions for individual and groups of emoji? In 100 years they will just be an ordinary feature of language somewhere between a word and a punctuation mark.

[thfuran]

There are also occasionally significant visual differences between the platforms. Like, a squirt gun and a handgun just aren't the same thing.

[julianeon]

Incidentally in Slack you can easily set up a workflow where "emoji response -> text macro" (aka more information, a text supplement to your emoji). Very useful if you have a Slack channel that is deluged with questions.

[deredede]

Yeah, emoji on top of color is redundant and less legible. I find that people that use emojis for dashboards and the like tend to overuse them, but I agree with GP in that a single (well aligned and on an adequately colored background for contrast) emoji per item can convey a lot of info quite efficiently.

[UI_at_80x24]

Yes and No.

Many years ago I built an elaborate dashboard/status page that was a front-end for a dozen or so CLI processes that did the heavy lifting for our video->VR->CDN->website->SEO link farm.

I used very simple "error codes" to flag when/where in the process errors would happen. 5 shapes, 5 colours, and 1-5 in numbers Square, Star, Circle, Triangle, Exclamation mark. Black, Blue, Grey, Yellow, Red 1,2,3,4,5

Different people/departments would be check on different aspects of deployment. This prevented the glassy eyed blank stares when I would ask: What was the error code. Me and the other IT folks knew what each stage meant, along with the colour codes and severity number would allow us to pinpoint where in the process this happened. So this was a form of emojii, and it was VERY helpful. I would have preferred error codes/server number/step number but Bob in Marketing would just ignore that. He never could remember 'what it said'. But he always remembered "Red Square and #5"

Symbols that are __EASY__ to identify (especially when attention spans are short) are tremendously helpful. [See Traffic signs as an example]

Esoteric symbols that can change meaning and/or have no meaning in the context are HORRIBLE. I'm on the spectrum, I can't tell what any "face emojii" mean.

[mr_mitm]

> I'm on the spectrum, I can't tell what any "face emojii" mean.

Then again, about 3% of all people are color blind.

[xmprt]

The problem is that symbols are also easy to misremembered or misidentified. It's easy to identify a red square but if Bob accidentally recalls a blue square or a red triangle, then all of a sudden you're looking for an error that didn't happen.

[duxup]

When used thoughtfully, I find my clients love emojis on some things and they seem to work better than many web icons.

Warning Emoji, a weight, phone emoji ... people see them every day and understand them immediately.

https://emojipedia.org/warning

Granted silly emojis, those that imply other things, eggplant. Not so much. And the burrito is just for developer type stuff.

[nvartolomei]

You’ll love to learn more about Chernoff faces! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernoff_face

[scubbo]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernoff_face supports your take - humans are hard-wired to recognize and parse faces, why wouldn't we make use of that shortcut!?

[deadbabe]

Emojis are incredible for variable names in code, it solves the hard problem of naming things.

[thfuran]

Most importantly, they help make code easier to read than to write.

[devmor]

Emojis are great for conveying the wide and varied levels of human emotion that differ from person to person that may type the same exact sentence with an entirely different meaning.

This is especially true when you have repeated communications with someone and come to understand how and when they use certain emojis.

For this same reason, I don't think they are great for technical information. They feel antithetical to the purpose of conveying exact information. You can use them as iconography, but purpose-made iconography is still superior, in my view.

[ravenstine]

Emojis can be done properly. Infrequent use with good contextual positioning can break a person's preoccupation and direct their attention when it counts.

Poor utilization of emojis, put simply, is using them all the time in ways that don't actually enhance the attention or meaning of the surrounding text.

The problem with emojis is people like them too much, and I have little faith that they would be used wisely by most programmers if some influential figure like Uncle Bub Martin told everyone to start using emojis for all the things.

[reidjs]

Agree, especially for conveying tone, eg, happy, frustration, danger, etc, especially in dialog.

There is an art to using them to enhance a message instead of obscuring it, though.

[bitwize]

cdparanoia used to use ASCII emoticons as status indicators -- :-) for when things were going well for instance.

[AnimalMuppet]

More dystopian (and maybe more useful): A roll-eyes emoji when you're asking it to do something stupid.

(It's more dystopian, because the computer has to know when you're asking it to do something stupid. Even more dystopian: It gives you the roll-eyes when you ask it to do something that it doesn't want to do.)

[quectophoton]

My reaction: :skull_emoji: :skull_emoji: :skull_emoji:

> a fire emoji when it's eating CPU

Fire emoji obviously signals that everything is going nice and smooth tho.

> etc etc etc.

Or the bottom/submissive emoji when you're in root/privileged mode.

Or the ok_hand emoji when there's something wrong (see ASL, and also The Expanse).

/s