I don't understand how the pictures help. The core formula is compact, but that doesn't make it bad. A few sentences of explanation is great for people who haven't learned standard high-school-level math notation or who want a walkthrough as a refresher (so thanks tonthr author for writing it down ), but refusing to learn math notation is going to make learning every math concept harder, penny wise and pound foolish. I don't see how this blog post/book chapter's explanation is novel as it claims to be, or why every other explanation of floating point is supposedly poor. I suspect it's just a matter of learning concepts requires thinking, so thrilled author jotted notes while he was thinking, and misattributed his progress to the specific visuals and no to the process of thinking about the formula.
The hard part of floating point isn't the representation of numbers, it's how to perform arithmetic with rounding/truncation in the specified way (and why the specified way is preferred). The blog post doesn't touch on that at all.
Personally, I might be able to convert a number to floating point using the formula, but it's not easy to grasp why. The visual explanation really helps with that.
Being able to read maths doesn't automatically mean that it is the best way to present an explanation of something.
Any mathematical instruction I have found helpful has had a big emphasis on building “intuition“. This post was the first explanation I encountered that explained floating point encoding in a way that was immediately relatable and understandable to me. There are multiple ways to describe a thing, different people have different relationships to a thing which may make some descriptions more well-suited than others, and different people have different goals.
The hard part of floating point isn't the representation of numbers, it's how to perform arithmetic with rounding/truncation in the specified way (and why the specified way is preferred). The blog post doesn't touch on that at all.