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one great property of the terminal is that it’s not a continuous canvas. it’s a grid of discrete cells, just as it is natural for computers to be. instead of la

by ulbu 2y ago

one great property of the terminal is that it’s not a continuous canvas. it’s a grid of discrete cells, just as it is natural for computers to be. instead of laying interactive objects out in virtual space, you’re pushed to think in discrete states and discrete actions. so I say cli is, indeed, good in part due of its limitations. edit: i’ll add that continuousness of guis is actually its limitation. a terminal interface is indexable, a gui is not. so what looks like freedom is actually a different structure. a gui is more general, as real numbers are more general than whole numbers. but to get to whole numbers, you have to re-constrain real numbers. this is left up to the developer to create a constraining framework. and it’s a path of less resistance to not do this. most data we deal with is discrete. so a continuous representation of it is a mismatch of structures. terminals force you to stay in that same discrete space. so your solutions are from the getgo closer in fit to your data. it’s important to match up the structure of your interactive surface with the structure of your domain. it’s a common principle we talk about too little.

cdrini 2y ago
I think that's it, although I don't think I'd describe it as a grid, but as a 1d list. The core concept of CLIs is linear. That's in part why streaming works so effectively in CLIs, because the linear medium clicks really well with the idea of streaming data. And actually the fact that a lot of UNIX commands actually operate on a graph of sorts under-the-hood is where you can see some of the limitations of this linear approach (eg trying to pipe one stream to multiple paths with each path having its own processing requires a branch which is inherently a little difficult to represent in a linear system). You can lay things out in a grid, but the same can be said of GUIs. You can consider each character a cell in a grid, but I think that's so small that at that point it's not conceptually sufficiently different from being continuous. The computational paradigm that's a grid at its core is spreadsheets.

by ulbu 2y ago

cdrini 2y ago

I think that's it, although I don't think I'd describe it as a grid, but as a 1d list. The core concept of CLIs is linear. That's in part why streaming works so effectively in CLIs, because the linear medium clicks really well with the idea of streaming data. And actually the fact that a lot of UNIX commands actually operate on a graph of sorts under-the-hood is where you can see some of the limitations of this linear approach (eg trying to pipe one stream to multiple paths with each path having its own processing requires a branch which is inherently a little difficult to represent in a linear system). You can lay things out in a grid, but the same can be said of GUIs. You can consider each character a cell in a grid, but I think that's so small that at that point it's not conceptually sufficiently different from being continuous. The computational paradigm that's a grid at its core is spreadsheets.