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"A picture paints a thousand words, sure, but here's a thousand word essay. Try painting me a picture of it." I don't remember where I hard that, or close to i

by simonh 5y ago

"A picture paints a thousand words, sure, but here's a thousand word essay. Try painting me a picture of it." I don't remember where I hard that, or close to it, but there's a lot of truth to it. There do seem to be some very useful visual logic and work flow tools, I hope that continues, but there's something magical about the ability of language to explain, describe and precisely define things. Maybe eventually we'll arrive at a state where really good programming environments incorporate the advantages of both textual and visual tools in a powerful and dynamic way. I love films and picture books, I also love novels, but even the best novels are enhanced by really good illustrations and sometimes even maps. Some authors find visual tools like relationship maps and even geographic maps help them in the actual authoring process too.

hutzlibu 5y ago
"Maybe eventually we'll arrive at a state where really good programming environments incorporate the advantages of both textual and visual tools in a powerful and dynamic way. " Yes, I agree. But not surprisingly, this is not easy to solve. You need a visual language as a consistent concept and then you need a actual visual framework, rendering it all, and enabling user input. You need a compiler compiling forth and back, between text and visu. And then it needs to scale. And be performant enough to actually work with it and not just have a visual demo. Sounds hard? Trust me, it is.
- simonh 5y ago
  I listened to a podcast a while ago where someone was speculating why programs processing data can't just be connected together like devices in a water system. Pumps, sinks, boilers, showers, etc. Or like electrical devices, just channel the data between them. It occurred to me that data isn't like water, or electricity. Those are generic resources that can largely be easily standardised and treated consistently by any device. Data isn't like that. Data formats and encoding vary hugely and can have crazy different properties. It's more like piping chemicals between devices in a chemical factory. You can't just take the output from a device producing acid and plug the pipe into the input of a device that's designed to process water, or ammonia, or petrol. They're all 'just' fluids and you can pipe them about, but their properties vary wildly. You can only feed one into a device as input if that device is specifically designed to process that specific material. Yes it is possible to define standardised data formats, up to a point. XML, JSON, CSV, etc but even then you can't just feed arbitrary JSON into every program designed to ingest JSON and expect it to work, just because the data it expects is JSON formatted. Yes Unix has pipes, but each tool in the pipe chain has to be told exactly how to process the specific input it gets from the previous tool. You can't just look in history for two arbitrary examples of using pipes, and cut and paste the first half of one pipe chain, and paste the second half of another arbitrary pipe chain on the end, and expect to get something useful out of the combination. Maybe you'll get lucky, but usually you'll get garbage.
  - hutzlibu 5y ago
    "It occurred to me that data isn't like water, or electricity. Those are generic resources that can largely be easily standardised and treated consistently by any device." Well, electricity is not really easy either. There is a huge effort, to transform the current in the needed shape (voltage, current, frequency, DC vs. AC, smoothened... And water is also not just water, as it can be clean drinking water, or sewage water, or hot (but slightly dirty) water for the heating, or you have hot, high pressured steam, ... Not just coding is complicated ;)
    - MShawCN 5y ago
      That's exactly what I was thinking. Electrical engineering is a complex field and may seem easy from the outside simply because of its maturity, but I would argue is the hardest of the engineering disciplines to grasp as well as one of the most important.
    - bena 5y ago
      I don't think he was trying to imply that coding was the only thing that's complicated. I think it comes back to "No Silver Bullet" and what it has to say about accidental and essential difficulties. There may be impurities in water, yes, and it can be several temperatures, but water is water is water. It's still chemically two hydrogen atoms connected to a single oxygen. We can define what pure water is. Having that definition allows us to define tolerances for how much "not-water" is in the water. What kind of pipe is necessary to deal with the not-water, etc. The essential difficulties of plumbing and water management are never really about the water, it's about how to deal with not-water. Same with electricity, the way it moves may be differing, but it's still just electrons. There's no special electricity that will conduct through rubber. Again, we can define what electricity is. And again, having those definitions, we've moved our essential difficulties to the not-electricity part of the problem. There is no standard "data". We cannot define what data is. Because it kind of is everything. It's a nebulous, abstract concept. It doesn't mean anything on its own. What we really want to do is process subsets of that data. And filtering to that subset is the essential difficulty. And then you have the issue that two consumers of data could want similar data, but not quite. So data's essentially difficulties come sooner and once you've transformed your data into water, you still have more essential difficulties to handle.
hypertele-Xii 5y ago
What if the painting could change? What if you could touch the painting and explore it interactively? What if the painting engulfed all your senses, creating the illusion that you're in the painting? The journey of media from print to VR. While it'll certainly take more than 1000 words to program the painting in VR, if a million people see it, the value ratio is pretty good.
- mjw1007 5y ago
  If you're starting from an essay, I doubt all those things together would he as helpful as adding a spoken-word audio track. Or some text.

by simonh 5y ago

hutzlibu 5y ago

"Maybe eventually we'll arrive at a state where really good programming environments incorporate the advantages of both textual and visual tools in a powerful and dynamic way. " Yes, I agree. But not surprisingly, this is not easy to solve. You need a visual language as a consistent concept and then you need a actual visual framework, rendering it all, and enabling user input. You need a compiler compiling forth and back, between text and visu. And then it needs to scale. And be performant enough to actually work with it and not just have a visual demo. Sounds hard? Trust me, it is.

simonh 5y ago
I listened to a podcast a while ago where someone was speculating why programs processing data can't just be connected together like devices in a water system. Pumps, sinks, boilers, showers, etc. Or like electrical devices, just channel the data between them. It occurred to me that data isn't like water, or electricity. Those are generic resources that can largely be easily standardised and treated consistently by any device. Data isn't like that. Data formats and encoding vary hugely and can have crazy different properties. It's more like piping chemicals between devices in a chemical factory. You can't just take the output from a device producing acid and plug the pipe into the input of a device that's designed to process water, or ammonia, or petrol. They're all 'just' fluids and you can pipe them about, but their properties vary wildly. You can only feed one into a device as input if that device is specifically designed to process that specific material. Yes it is possible to define standardised data formats, up to a point. XML, JSON, CSV, etc but even then you can't just feed arbitrary JSON into every program designed to ingest JSON and expect it to work, just because the data it expects is JSON formatted. Yes Unix has pipes, but each tool in the pipe chain has to be told exactly how to process the specific input it gets from the previous tool. You can't just look in history for two arbitrary examples of using pipes, and cut and paste the first half of one pipe chain, and paste the second half of another arbitrary pipe chain on the end, and expect to get something useful out of the combination. Maybe you'll get lucky, but usually you'll get garbage.
- hutzlibu 5y ago
  "It occurred to me that data isn't like water, or electricity. Those are generic resources that can largely be easily standardised and treated consistently by any device." Well, electricity is not really easy either. There is a huge effort, to transform the current in the needed shape (voltage, current, frequency, DC vs. AC, smoothened... And water is also not just water, as it can be clean drinking water, or sewage water, or hot (but slightly dirty) water for the heating, or you have hot, high pressured steam, ... Not just coding is complicated ;)
  - MShawCN 5y ago
    That's exactly what I was thinking. Electrical engineering is a complex field and may seem easy from the outside simply because of its maturity, but I would argue is the hardest of the engineering disciplines to grasp as well as one of the most important.
  - bena 5y ago
    I don't think he was trying to imply that coding was the only thing that's complicated. I think it comes back to "No Silver Bullet" and what it has to say about accidental and essential difficulties. There may be impurities in water, yes, and it can be several temperatures, but water is water is water. It's still chemically two hydrogen atoms connected to a single oxygen. We can define what pure water is. Having that definition allows us to define tolerances for how much "not-water" is in the water. What kind of pipe is necessary to deal with the not-water, etc. The essential difficulties of plumbing and water management are never really about the water, it's about how to deal with not-water. Same with electricity, the way it moves may be differing, but it's still just electrons. There's no special electricity that will conduct through rubber. Again, we can define what electricity is. And again, having those definitions, we've moved our essential difficulties to the not-electricity part of the problem. There is no standard "data". We cannot define what data is. Because it kind of is everything. It's a nebulous, abstract concept. It doesn't mean anything on its own. What we really want to do is process subsets of that data. And filtering to that subset is the essential difficulty. And then you have the issue that two consumers of data could want similar data, but not quite. So data's essentially difficulties come sooner and once you've transformed your data into water, you still have more essential difficulties to handle.

hypertele-Xii 5y ago

What if the painting could change? What if you could touch the painting and explore it interactively? What if the painting engulfed all your senses, creating the illusion that you're in the painting? The journey of media from print to VR. While it'll certainly take more than 1000 words to program the painting in VR, if a million people see it, the value ratio is pretty good.

mjw1007 5y ago
If you're starting from an essay, I doubt all those things together would he as helpful as adding a spoken-word audio track. Or some text.