2 ms·
> I agree with your issue of reification and I like the concept of a "wit." Thanks! I had it as a vague idea for several years, though it has been getting a lo
by TuringTest 4y ago
> I agree with your issue of reification and I like the concept of a "wit."
Thanks! I had it as a vague idea for several years, though it has been getting a lot more concrete as I've seen new tools adopting similar approaches - but without any of them taking the final step of converting a search result collection into a user-accessible object ready for direct manipulation.
And now that I see tools adopting that style of data management, the concept allows me to see the commonalities among tools with quite different approaches - be it tabular Nocode storage like Airtable or outliners like Roam, Workflowy and the like. Whenever the tool returns a collection from a data gathering process, I see a wit that should be able to be extracted and further processed by the user.
BTW, the main difference between a query result and a wit is that you can store its items in the same structure as the rest of your content in the outliner, and send them to a new process (like spreadsheet cells, but with hierarchical data). Usually, query results are presented through a different interface than the rest of content, but a 'wit' should be homoiconic like Lisp.
(Errata to my grandparent post: a 'bit' is a "minimum unit of data", of course, not of knowledge).
> Exciting times!
You bet! :-D