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Reading these replies, it's surprising to me how many people think that constraining writing a linear sequence of fixed characters is somehow natural as opposed

Reading these replies, it's surprising to me how many people think that constraining writing a linear sequence of fixed characters is somehow natural as opposed to a simplification made for cost and technical reasons by Gutenberg, typewriters, keyboards, and ASCII. Writing is more than this. Writers can arrange characters in 2d space to convey semantic relationships in equations or among words. You can have multiple degrees of emphasis and italics. You can get a sense of which parts of the equation or prose were written quickly and which were written slowly and carefully. Often it conveys a bit of personality. You can even include small drawings or sketches embedded within the text like Gallelo's illustration of Saturn's rings. I get that we have to strip out this kind of nuance for technical reasons, but claiming that writing ought to be constrained to only what can be represented in plain text feels like claiming that painting should be constrained to only what can be represented in a bitmap.

traverseda 4y ago
I have adhd, and personally I find it a lot easier to follow through "math" when it's step by step. When I can say "first this happens, than this". I'm sure part of it is a don't have a great toolbox to break problems down, but personally what you're describing sounds horrible. Like trying to read a book out of order.
User23 4y ago
I strongly agree that representing multidimensional structures with one dimensional strings is suboptimal. On the computing side I see this as an editor problem. It’s not hard to conceptualize some multidimensional editor, but evidently it is hard to build one that will overtake the traditional text editors and their not particularly more advanced IDE cousins. The closest such thing I’ve personally used was HyperCard. I think that for real progress in this area we’ll have to abandon the desire to keep editor and language separated.
bobbylarrybobby 4y ago
Edward Tufte, is that you?

traverseda 4y ago

I have adhd, and personally I find it a lot easier to follow through "math" when it's step by step. When I can say "first this happens, than this". I'm sure part of it is a don't have a great toolbox to break problems down, but personally what you're describing sounds horrible. Like trying to read a book out of order.

User23 4y ago

I strongly agree that representing multidimensional structures with one dimensional strings is suboptimal. On the computing side I see this as an editor problem. It’s not hard to conceptualize some multidimensional editor, but evidently it is hard to build one that will overtake the traditional text editors and their not particularly more advanced IDE cousins. The closest such thing I’ve personally used was HyperCard. I think that for real progress in this area we’ll have to abandon the desire to keep editor and language separated.

bobbylarrybobby 4y ago

Edward Tufte, is that you?