> So the bottleneck would appear to be, not the physical limitations of communication, but the rate at which we can structure information to be consumed by anot

> So the bottleneck would appear to be, not the physical limitations of communication, but the rate at which we can structure information to be consumed by another mind. Yet the way in which we must structure information surely plays a role in how quickly we can do it, right? I can certainly read faster than I can speak, and I'm also confident that I can read with full comprehension faster than I can listen with full comprehension to someone speaking very fast, like at the end of a medicine commercial or the Micro Machines guy. Take for example a physics teacher. They are fond of drawing diagrams because it's a quicker and easier way to refer to the concepts in play than relying on words alone. If we had the capability to project the imagery that accompanies our thoughts so that others could see it, I suspect we'd have to do a lot less talking. And in fact we practice this already with feelings and body language--most of us know when we've committed a faux pas before anybody says a word about it. The same goes for programming: my thought is "i want to get all of the user's preferences", which is surely faster than finding where to put the query, when to call it, and then testing its correctness. This is one of the things that Alan Kay and Bret Victor go on about--getting the machine to be usable at a level that is closer to the problem space than to machine code. I understand what you meant, that typing at 300 WPM won't help you to design a system. But a visual development environment that actually works probably would, because it would let you work at a more conceptual level most of the time instead of typing magic words into a terminal.