5 ms·

I have mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, I agree: text is infinitely versatile, indexable, durable, etc. But, after discovering Bret Victor's work[1],

• dkarl 10mo ago
  I think the downside, at least near-term, or maybe challenge would be the better word, is that anything richer than text requires a lot more engineering to make it useful. B♭ is text. Most of the applications on your computer, including but not limited to your browser, know how to render B♭ and C♯, and your brain does the rest. Bret Victor's work involves a ton of really challenging heavy lifting. You walk away from a Bret Victor presentation inspired, but also intimidated by the work put in, and the work required to do anything similar. When you separate his ideas from the work he puts in to perfect the implementation and presentation, the ideas by themselves don't seem to do much. Which doesn't mean they're bad ideas, but it might mean that anybody hoping to get the most out of them should understand the investment that is required to bring them to fruition, and people with less to invest should stick with other approaches.
  • tomjakubowski 10mo ago
    > B♭ is text. Yes, but musical notation is far superior to text for conveying the information needed to play a song.
    • codebaobab 10mo ago
      Yes. And I create and manage the musical notation for over 100 songs in text, specifically Lilypond.
      • donkyrf 10mo ago
        If we accepted the validity of this argument, then literally everything that can be represented by a computer can be referred to as text. It renders the term "text" effectively meaningless.
        • smj-edison 10mo ago
          To be fair, in Lilypond's case, it is an ASCII interface that renders to sheet music (kind of like openSCAD).
    • satvikpendem 10mo ago
      I don't understand, musical notation is text though so how can it be superior to itself?
      • BrenBarn 10mo ago
        I think they mean staff notation, not a textual notation like "B♭".
        • dhosek 10mo ago
          Although, one could make the argument that staff notation is itself a form of text, albeit one with a different notation than a single stream of Unicode symbols. Certainly, without musical notation, a lot of music is lost (although, one can argue that musical notation is not able to adequately preserve some aspects of musical performance which is part of why when European composers tried to adopt jazz idioms into their compositions in the early twentieth century working from sheet music, they missed the whole concept of swing which is essential to jazz).
  • smj-edison 10mo ago
    > You walk away from a Bret Victor presentation inspired, but also intimidated by the work put in, and the work required to do anything similar. When you separate his ideas from the work he puts in to perfect the implementation and presentation, the ideas by themselves don't seem to do much. Amen to that. Even dynamic land has some major issues with GC pauses and performance issues. I do try to put my money where my mouth is, so I've been contributing a lot to folk computer[1], but yeah, there's still a ton of open questions, and it's not as easy as he sometimes makes it look. [1] https://folk.computer/ https://folk.computer/
    • assimpleaspossi 10mo ago
      Folk computer looks interesting. I wonder what it is. You'll never find that out by looking at that link.
      • smj-edison 10mo ago
        That's fair. It's still pre-alpha, and under heavy development, but it's working on taking the best of dynamicland[1] and trying to take it a lot further. In terms of technical details, we just landed support for multithreaded task scheduling in the reactive database, so you can do something like When /someone/ wishes $::thisNode uses display /display/ with /...displayOpts/ { and have your rendering loop block the thread. Folk will automatically spin up a new thread when it detects that a thread is blocking, in order to keep processing the queue. Making everything multithreaded has made synchronizing rendering frames a lot tricker, but recently Omar (one of the head devs) made statements atomic, so there is atomic querying for statements that need it. In terms of philosophy, Folk is much more focused on integration, and comes from the Unix philosophy of everything as text (which I still find amusingly ironic when the focus is also a new medium). The main scripting language is Tcl, which is sort of a child of Lisp and Bash. We intermix html, regex, js, C, and even some Haskell to get stuff done. Whatever happens to be the most effective ends up being what we use. I'm glad that you mention that the main page is unhelpful, because I hadn't considered that. Do you have any suggestions on what would explain the project better? [1] https://dynamicland.org/ https://dynamicland.org/
• tomjakubowski 10mo ago
  Take a problem like untangling a pile of cords. Writing out how to do that in text would be a drag, and reading those directions probably wouldn't be helpful either. But a kid can learn how to untangle just by observation. Physical intuition is an enormous part of our intelligence, and is hard to convey in text: you could read millions of words about how to ride a bike, and you would learn nothing compared to spending a few hours trying it out and falling over until it clicks.
  • bmicraft 10mo ago
    I think the bicycle argument doesn't work; you don't learn to ride a bicycle, you train to do it. Knowing how to do it isn't good enough, your conscious brain isn't fast enough to calculate and achieve balance. You need to train your reflexes to keep the balance for you.
    • bavell 10mo ago
      ... training IS learning.
    • agnishom 10mo ago
      this is the "is all knowledge propositional knowledge" question
• safety1st 10mo ago
  I mean, this very discussion is a case study in the supremacy of text. I skimmed the OP's blog post in thirty seconds and absorbed his key ideas. Your link is to a 54 minute video on an interesting topic which I unfortunately don't have time to watch. While I have no doubt that there are interesting ideas in it, video's inferior to text for communicating ideas efficiently, so most people reading this thread will never learn those ideas. Text is certainly not the best at all things and I especially get the idea that in pedagogy you might want other things in a feedback loop. The strength of text however is its versatility, especially in an age where text transformers are going through a renaissance. I think 90%+ of the time you want to default to text, use text as your source of truth, and then other mediums can be brought into play (perhaps as things you transform your text into) as the circumstances warrant.
  • whattheheckheck 10mo ago
    The fidelity and encoding strength of the "idea" you got the gist of from skimming might be less than the "idea" you receive when you spend the time to watch the 54 minute video
  • smj-edison 10mo ago
    Actually, you might want to check the video again, it has sections and a full transcript on the right side, precisely to make skimming easy! > video's inferior to text for communicating ideas efficiently Depends on the topic tbh. For example, YouTube has had an absolute explosion of car repair videos, precisely because video format works so well for visual operations. But yes, text is currently the best way to skim/revisit material. That's one reason I find Bret's website so intriguing, since he tries to introduce those navigation affordances into a video medium. > The strength of text however is its versatility, especially in an age where text transformers are going through a renaissance. I think 90%+ of the time you want to default to text, use text as your source of truth, and then other mediums can be brought into play (perhaps as things you transform your text into) as the circumstances warrant. Agree, though not because of text's intrinsic ability, but because its ecosystem stretches thousands of years. It's certainly the most pragmatic choice of 2025. But, I want to see just how far other mediums can go, and I think there's a lot of untapped potential!
• fercircularbuf 10mo ago
  Thank you so much for introducing me to this talk. Changed my way of thinking.
• godelski 10mo ago
  Working in any science should also make this argument clearer. Data as text is hard to read and communicate. Even explanations of results. But graphs? Those are worth a thousand words. They communicate so much so fast. There's also a lot of skill to doing this accurately and well, just as one can say about writing. A whole subfield of computer graphics is dedicated to data visualization because it's so useful. Including things like colors. Things people often ignore because it feels so natural and obvious but actually isn't. I think it's naïve to claim there's a singular best method to communicate. Text is great, especially since it is asynchronous. But even the OP works off of bad assumptions that are made about verbal language being natural and not being taught. But there's a simple fact, when near another person we strongly prefer to speak than write. And when we can mix modes we like to. There's an art to all this and I think wanting to have a singular mode is more a desire of simplicity than a desire to be optimal
  • inciampati 10mo ago
    It is true that graphs communicate very well. But they do come from text... And in the end we need to be able to describe what we see in them in text.
    • smj-edison 10mo ago
      But they are multiple different "views" into data, and I would posit that a textual view of data is no different than a graphical view, no? If you import data from a parquet file, you go straight from numbers to graphs, so I disagree that it comes from text. Both graphs and text come from information. Circles on surveys, Arduino temperature readings, counter clickers when doing surveys. Those are not just text.
    • tsimionescu 10mo ago
      No, you do not need to, and will not generally be able to, describe everything that a graph conveys in text. Graphs can give you an intuitive understanding of the data that text would not be able to, simply by virtue of using other parts of the brain and requiring less short term memory. If a graph can be replaced with 5 pages of text, that doesn't mean that you get the same information from both - you're likely much more able to keep one image in your short term memory than 5 pages of text.
• JohnLocke4 10mo ago
  I think the obvious thing to do here is to say "Always bet on symbolics". What separates text from images is that text is symbolic while images are visceral or feelings based. In the same way, text comes in short when it comes to the feeling you get when seeing an image. Try to put in to text what you feel when you look at Norman Rockwell's Freedom of Speech or a crappy 0.5MB picture of your daughter taken on an iPhone 3. Hard isn't it? Visual and symbolic are not isomorphic systems. Examples of symbolic systems like text are sheet music and Feynman diagrams. You would be hard pressed if you tried to convey even 2KB of sheet music in a book
• groundzeros2015 10mo ago
  The missing ingredient you mentioned is the coach. You can pay a private math tutor to watch you solve math and engineering problems and give you direction a long the way. Few families do that.
  • smj-edison 10mo ago
    For now, in most cases, yes. I think Khan Academy is a great example of moving in the right direction. They have a lot of interactive lessons in early math, where you drag and drop for counting and grouping. Another good example is the DragonBox series of apps where they make math more intuitive by providing immediate feedback and a new representation. Dynamicland is pushing the state-of-the-art here too. I think you'd really like their essay "The Library"[1]. [1] https://dynamicland.org/2019/The_Library.pdf https://dynamicland.org/2019/The_Library.pdf
• einpoklum 10mo ago
  Can you explain what you mean by "This is... something that doesn't work well with text"? Text as opposed to what? If you were to "play" music by typing notes, then you would compare your typed note against the string of correct notes. Of course that sounds a bit silly, and probably not what you meant, so, please elaborate.
  • smj-edison 10mo ago
    Sorry if that wasn't clear! I meant text as opposed to having verbal and physical coaching. My teacher would often demonstrate a technique by playing it on her piano, which was adjacent to mine. I even had a masterclass with one teacher who would grab my hand and guide it as she demonstrated what I needed to do. An example of where text falls short: if I said "be sure to rainbow your wrist when jumping in that passage," it wouldn't make any sense unless someone had seen an explanation. I suppose I could try to explain "when moving higher, make an upwards arc, and loop around at the end, to prevent jerking your wrist around when going back and forth," but even then that's still way too ambigious, since there's also a certain way you need to pivot your wrist so you can hold onto the upper chord as long as possible. It's just much easier to demonstrate and see if the student did it correctly.
• TimByte 10mo ago
  Where I keep coming back, though, is that text still seems to be the backbone that lets those richer systems scale and persist
  • ignoramous 10mo ago
    Especially today when UI & tools built around LLMs, specifically code gen & image gen, demonstrate a seismic shift in just how far text will go.