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.

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.

> 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).

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.

"What are letters?"

"Kinda like mediaglyphs except they're all black, and they're tiny, they don't move, they're old and boring and really hard to read."

-- The Diamond Age (Neal Stephenson)

Plenty of words are contractions or otherwise combinations of other words that you don't know about unless you're particularly interested in language.

"Goodbye" = "God be with ye" for example

You don't think "will not" when you say "won't", "won't" is just a word you use with a meaning you understand long before you can write.

See my other comment below, but all the things you're talking about work because English has a phonetic alphabet.

You can break 'be with ye' into 'b', 'y', and 'e', and drop the rest. In languages like Chinese which do not have a phonetic writing system, you cannot drop individual sounds within a word/character in a rule-based way like contractions.

Emojis are not a phonetic system, so unless you created an emoji for "they're", separate from the emojis for "they" and "are", you wouldn't have it as a word.

Haven’t read it, but society is quite changed in The Diamond Age, I think. In the protagonist even speaking English? If not, we could assume it is sort of “translated” into English (in the sense that most fiction that doesn’t take place on modern day Earth is).

This actually makes the most sense out of any of the replies, honestly.

You don't need to know how to write to speak.

No, but languages that use glyphs that are monophonemic and non-phonetic (one-sound per-glyph/character) don't have contractions, which are a function of removing some component part of a word when combining them.

For instance, both Chinese and Japanese use kanji/hanzi, but Chinese is monophonemic, and does not have a phonetic alphabet that characters can be broken into (radicals aside, which are not related to sound). Japanese does (kana).

As a result, combining 2 characters in Chinese never changes the sound of some sub-portion of a character; it's either the whole sound that changes, or nothing. In Japanese, on the other hand, individual kana within a character can change (e.g. Rendaku), so for instance 'hito' (person) put twice in a row becomes hitobito instead of hitohito, because hito is comprised of 2 kana characters: 'hi' and 'to', and 'hi' becomes 'bi'.

Emoji have no subcomponent characters, so you either would need an emoji for a contraction word in addition to the source words, or, more realistically, you just wouldn't have them at all.

And you're saying that in Japanese and Chinese no word is ever informally pronounced in abbreviated fashion by eliding some phoneme(s)?

In Japanese, yes, because it has a phonetic alphabet. For example, "konnichiwa" is often shortened as "kon'chiwa".

In Chinese, there is shorthand slang, but not shortening of words in writing based on spoken sounds (since it's not phonetic).

So even if "wo shi" (I am) might be spoken more quickly, there's no way to write that shortened version out in Chinese. You will actually see Chinese speakers use Latin characters and Arabic numerals for phonetic shorthand, (e.g. '88' for "bye bye", because 8 is pronounced 'ba'/'bai'.

Because it wasn't always.

I don't think they will. The problem with them isn't that people don't understand what they mean, it's that they require a lot of context to understand even when they are used naturally and freely. There's a reason why languages have grammar. They're really used for decoration, or to disambiguate between a short list of expected responses already established in the past by using words.

i.e. a handful of emojis to explain the state of a machine is no more expressive than using a handful of colors to do the same thing. In that situation you'd react the same way to an emoji that I've thrown at you for the first time as with a color I've thrown at you for the first time. Suddenly the indicator is violet, or the indicator is smileyface emoji with big hearts for eyes: the question is what that meant to the programmer, and the emoji doesn't give any more indication than the color. "Are you trying to tell me that the server really loves my new blouse?"

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

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.

reactj to create jira tickets, kick off PRs/builds/etc are the unsung workflow heros of slack

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.

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.

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

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

That's precisely why I added emojis. In early versions of the game, the starvation levels were only represented by colors.

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.

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.

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

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!?

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

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

Those who forget APL are doomed to reinvent it, poorly.

omg yes

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.

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.

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.

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

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.)

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