[lazamar]

There is one way in which Huffman codes are better: they are easier to explain and simpler to implement.

I went for simplicity of exposition in the post, but arithmetic coders can indeed get arbitrarily close to the entropy, which is not quite the case with Huffman.

[nottorp]

> easier to explain

I think Huffman is the one compression algorithm that compresses stuff significantly that can fit on the proverbial napkin, so it's a good start.

The others require the whole napkin stack at the table.