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Why are people so afraid of moving forward? Imagine saying “always bet on punch cards”. Look at any whiteboard in any company or school. It’s filled with text

by bmitc 6y ago

Why are people so afraid of moving forward? Imagine saying “always bet on punch cards”. Look at any whiteboard in any company or school. It’s filled with text and diagrams. Then watch how someone interacts with a PowerPoint or whiteboard. There is animation and dimensional extension. The way people think and organize and communicate thoughts is multifaceted and multidimensional. It only makes sense that we should be able to work and program in the same way.

bitL 6y ago
It's academia and some important professions (lawyers, accountants) that are primarily audio-textual in their perception and those often occupy the most important decision-making positions, forcing their mode of operation on everybody else, even if 80% of people have a different dominant perception mode.
the_af 6y ago
I don't think people are afraid of moving forward. Plenty of alternatives have been proposed, and text remains as effective as ever. The problem with punch cards is that they weren't effective: they were what technology permitted back then. But technology permits many other things besides text nowadays, and text still remains an amazing and effective piece of "technology", in the broadest sense of the term. Are we communicating, right now, via animation or fancy PowerPoint slides?
- bmitc 6y ago
  I don’t think hybrid or non-textual methods have really been given their due or worked on so much, simply because the only-text sentiment is so pervasive. I’m not proposing punch cards as effective. It was just a simple comparative example, which I thought was clear and that the rest of my post clarified what I actually meant. > Are we communicating, right now, via animation or fancy PowerPoint slides? It’s ironic you bring this up, because I don’t find this method particularly effective.
  - wmil 6y ago
    > I don’t think hybrid or non-textual methods have really been given their due or worked on so much, The problem is that they really have. Visual thinkers in academia have been aggressively pursuing this in CS PhDs and research since the 80s or even 70s. The results haven't been great. Visual programming works well for some limited cases. Rational Rose, which produces code from UML diagrams, came out in 1994 and has been in continuous development since, has not taken over the world. The big problem is high information density. With text you can go through it in a linear fashion, even if it's very long. Diagrams tend to hit a breaking point where they're too complex to take in. There's no clear place to start. Then suddenly they are worthless.

by bmitc 6y ago

bitL 6y ago

It's academia and some important professions (lawyers, accountants) that are primarily audio-textual in their perception and those often occupy the most important decision-making positions, forcing their mode of operation on everybody else, even if 80% of people have a different dominant perception mode.

the_af 6y ago

I don't think people are afraid of moving forward. Plenty of alternatives have been proposed, and text remains as effective as ever. The problem with punch cards is that they weren't effective: they were what technology permitted back then. But technology permits many other things besides text nowadays, and text still remains an amazing and effective piece of "technology", in the broadest sense of the term. Are we communicating, right now, via animation or fancy PowerPoint slides?

bmitc 6y ago
I don’t think hybrid or non-textual methods have really been given their due or worked on so much, simply because the only-text sentiment is so pervasive. I’m not proposing punch cards as effective. It was just a simple comparative example, which I thought was clear and that the rest of my post clarified what I actually meant. > Are we communicating, right now, via animation or fancy PowerPoint slides? It’s ironic you bring this up, because I don’t find this method particularly effective.
- wmil 6y ago
  > I don’t think hybrid or non-textual methods have really been given their due or worked on so much, The problem is that they really have. Visual thinkers in academia have been aggressively pursuing this in CS PhDs and research since the 80s or even 70s. The results haven't been great. Visual programming works well for some limited cases. Rational Rose, which produces code from UML diagrams, came out in 1994 and has been in continuous development since, has not taken over the world. The big problem is high information density. With text you can go through it in a linear fashion, even if it's very long. Diagrams tend to hit a breaking point where they're too complex to take in. There's no clear place to start. Then suddenly they are worthless.