Turns out text is really, really good at conveying symbols serially. If anything, the big gripe I have with GUIs as a general technology is the fixation on hier

Turns out text is really, really good at conveying symbols serially. If anything, the big gripe I have with GUIs as a general technology is the fixation on hierarchies, aka graphs with single directed dimensions. You make this abstraction of files>folders>cabinets>desktops, then you make an interface that requires another abstraction - the mouse pointer - to deal with the first abstraction[0]. A mouse + graph computing environment[1] / file browser seems like . . I dunno . . a paradigm that maybe more closely aligns with the underlying essence of computing. But you know what? Computers are all abstraction, and if the desktop metaphor is so durable, that must be an abstraction that works for enough people. [0] Boy, do you see this pattern all the time. My day to day work is with XML schema that abstracts some real world quality, but then that abstraction is so poor it needs its own layers of abstraction in order to be manipulated by humans, and then those layers need some handle that relates it to the original thing being abstracted. [1] Which I realize, thinking about it for more than five seconds, is far, far, far beyond the computing capabilities of anything, say, pre-2004ish. Even if the user manually coded metadata for the graphing algorithm, not even considering dynamically extracting topics/ontologies, which is something that's still strenuous in real time applications.