4 ms·

If you had a blueprint of the whole of NewYork city, you surely would need some tool to abstract away the maze of individual lines and be able to refer-to/work-

If you had a blueprint of the whole of NewYork city, you surely would need some tool to abstract away the maze of individual lines and be able to refer-to/work-with concepts like "Central Park", "the Harlem", or "Brooklyn Bridge". It is not about how much more information can we convey, but how much less data must be expended to present a tractable model of reality to the human operator. Conveying more details is worse than useless, it results in informationi overload and cognitive stagnation. Historically, the way it happened in computer programming is those tools are text based. This is as much about the early use of computers as clerical aids to process business data, and the early synergies between computation and linguistics. Maybe it can be done, but it will require millions of man hours to accomplish. And almost nobody wants to invest in doing so because of the cost of opportunity.

imgabe 10y ago
Of course, there's the ability to zoom and pan to get the appropriate level of detail. There's a reason Google Maps isn't a text adventure.
- crpatino 10y ago
  In Google Maps, the ability to zoom relies heavily in a (unacknowledged) property of the problem domain: planar geometry. If every relevant detail is nicely clustered together and, more importantly, every irrelevant detail is nicely clustered far away from wherever you are zoomming-in, then sure! If, on the other hand, you cannot ever be 100% sure that fixing one stop light in Brooklyn will cause a bunch sewage lines to flush out to the street in Long Island, then zooming does more harm than good. At the end of day, you need the map to conform to the realities of the territory. If that gets in the way of that pretty abstraction of yours, then the abstraction - not reality - is wrong. And when that is the case, you need to start over and make a better map. Text based toolchains are, for all their limitations, a (sufficiently) reality conformant map. It does not mean there cannot be others; but as of today I do not know about any suitable candidate.

imgabe 10y ago

Of course, there's the ability to zoom and pan to get the appropriate level of detail. There's a reason Google Maps isn't a text adventure.

crpatino 10y ago
In Google Maps, the ability to zoom relies heavily in a (unacknowledged) property of the problem domain: planar geometry. If every relevant detail is nicely clustered together and, more importantly, every irrelevant detail is nicely clustered far away from wherever you are zoomming-in, then sure! If, on the other hand, you cannot ever be 100% sure that fixing one stop light in Brooklyn will cause a bunch sewage lines to flush out to the street in Long Island, then zooming does more harm than good. At the end of day, you need the map to conform to the realities of the territory. If that gets in the way of that pretty abstraction of yours, then the abstraction - not reality - is wrong. And when that is the case, you need to start over and make a better map. Text based toolchains are, for all their limitations, a (sufficiently) reality conformant map. It does not mean there cannot be others; but as of today I do not know about any suitable candidate.