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Towaway69 • yesterday at 5:00 PM • 2 replies • view on HN

Sure, I can use ascii graphics to represent 2D shapes in text but that's not a direct representation of the original object:

    \   |   /
      .-'-.
   -- (   ) --
      `-.-'
    /   |   \
That's a sun.

Much like HN is full of textual description and links to images - this entire forum demonstrates the limitations of a textual visual representation.

Yes it works but it's far more verbose than an image would be. Hence an image is worth a 1000 words. And hence HN is more verbose than it needs to be. So is coding more verbose than it needs to be. That's why DSLs (Domain Specific Language) get invented: to reduce the verbosity.

And so it is with a 2D representation: it reduces the verbosity required to transport ideas and concepts. UML is another invention to reduce the verbosity and increase the understanding of the representation of complex systems. Yes UML can be represented as text (see Mermaid[1]) but the UML image is probably a lot more understandable than the Mermaid representation.

[1]: https://github.com/mermaid-js/mermaid

Replies

lukan • yesterday at 7:03 PM

"Yes it works but it's far more verbose than an image would be. "

The word "sun" is less verbose than your drawing, but more clear(I would not have recognized it as a sun) and has all the information implied.

skydhash • yesterday at 5:42 PM

An image is not a good representation either. Where is heat? Where is size? Where is gravity? Images are useful, but so is text, each in a different way. The nice thing about text is that it encodes a much larger representation of something in only a few. So I can type 'sun' and it's useful enough to get my meaning without me showing you a picture every once in a while.

So yes in certain context, a diagram may be more useful to get a point across. But once that shared understanding has taken place, Text are more economical.

A lot of foundational aspects of computing are too abstract in nature to be able to do a good 2D or 3D representation. So what we do is transforming them into streams of symbols and do symbolic manipulations on them. And with symbolic manipulation, you get abstraction.

The main issue is that a lot of people are not good at symbolic representation and manipulation. Because it's abstract and it's entirely a product of the mind.

The power of computers is that they can do the tedious part of symbolic manipulations, repeatedly and without failing. And with peripherals interfacing, they can translate symbols from/to reality.

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