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Hint: it's a dead end people! Been around forever as an idea, lots of academic studies and some industry apps. Is it, though? For one thing, many feel that pro

Hint: it's a dead end people! Been around forever as an idea, lots of academic studies and some industry apps. Is it, though? For one thing, many feel that projects like Dataland led directly to the modern Windowed User Interface. One can think of opening windows as a kind of limited zooming with very specific affordances. The iOS UI is cited in the Wikipedia article on ZUI as being another example. Basically, any UI in which one can "drill down" into greater detail or smaller/more specific contexts is effectively a kind of zooming. The problem, is losing the connection to the larger context. Another thing to consider: At the time many of these things were tried out, there wasn't enough capability in the CPU and UI to render complex data fast enough. In fact, I was involved with a round-trip UML DB to UI product dating from the 1990's, which looked great in demos. However, it became dog slow when actually given someone's company database. This was a problem which dogged many projects with innovative UI ideas. (A problem which many CAD software apps deal with, and which seem to have been solved to some degree.) semantics in 2D isn't something that's easy to grasp cognitively unless you specifically arranged things that way Do you have specific examples?

karmakaze 2y ago
I was hoping that this was going to be about zooming contexts rather than renderings. It would be much effective to me if I could zoom in/out of contexts like on a distributed system diagram, and zooming in and in, until I got to a code browser for part of subsystem I wanted to change, and have those changes immediately effective, like a REPL but in the style of Smalltalk image.
- stcredzero 2y ago
  like a REPL but in the style of Smalltalk image Funny, but in my comment above, I'm referencing a Smalltalk program! Smalltalk environments are actually full of things that are functionally just about a REPL. until I got to a code browser for part of subsystem I wanted to change There are a variety of query languages for code repos. VisualWorks Smalltalk had two versions of this. One was based on the RefactoringBrowser code. There was another one that was a VisualWorks library. These could be used to pop up a very specific browser. For example, you could have a browser that just showed all of the implementers of a certain method X and referenced instance variable Y and called a method Z. I wish "modern" IDEs could support something like that. This would actually be very useful for providing context to LLMs.

karmakaze 2y ago

I was hoping that this was going to be about zooming contexts rather than renderings. It would be much effective to me if I could zoom in/out of contexts like on a distributed system diagram, and zooming in and in, until I got to a code browser for part of subsystem I wanted to change, and have those changes immediately effective, like a REPL but in the style of Smalltalk image.

stcredzero 2y ago
like a REPL but in the style of Smalltalk image Funny, but in my comment above, I'm referencing a Smalltalk program! Smalltalk environments are actually full of things that are functionally just about a REPL. until I got to a code browser for part of subsystem I wanted to change There are a variety of query languages for code repos. VisualWorks Smalltalk had two versions of this. One was based on the RefactoringBrowser code. There was another one that was a VisualWorks library. These could be used to pop up a very specific browser. For example, you could have a browser that just showed all of the implementers of a certain method X and referenced instance variable Y and called a method Z. I wish "modern" IDEs could support something like that. This would actually be very useful for providing context to LLMs.