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Comment by Towaway69

7 hours ago

So the textual representation of the Mona Lisa would actually be more suitable and beautiful?

It's surprising that there is any art at all if 1D textual representation is the ultimate way of representing concepts of the world around us. Incredible really that folks waste their time define colours for such thing as the sunshine.

Oh sorry, of course, you were talking of code - meaning that algorithm concepts are best represented in text? Again, I doubt that very much. Laziness of humans is probably the bigger reason why we're stuck with an inefficient textual representation of higher dimensional concepts.

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Towaway69

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skydhash  6 hours ago

You're saying that text are 1D, while we're saying that it's not. If it were, we would write text on a long rolling tape. If it were, we would write matrices like this:

  [1 2 3; 4 5 6; 7 8 9]

Instead of

  |1 2 3|
  |4 5 6|
  |7 8 9|

The concept of vertical space to separate blocks of text is important. The concept of physically moving the next chapter to a separate sheets of paper in books is equally important.

In code we split the code into files. Then within the files we arrange the code with lines and indentation. That's all for humans. The computer eagerly throws those away.

ADDENDUM

> meaning that algorithm concepts are best represented in text? Again, I doubt that very much.

One of the (most?) important things that algorithms encode is time. Because an algorithm is a description of a process. The only good representation would have been to snapshot the evolution of state.

But that's wasteful. So instead we have statements and expressions that we assume are atomic. Then we have identifiers for referencing and finally we have procedures and functions to cluster those statements and the associated call/return pattern or the single jump/goto to economize on writing.

So code is at least 2D as operations are described in a line and the lines are arranged by time. But the lines are not linear, instead they are grouped into labelled units and the proper evolution are functions call and jump instructions.

  • noosphr  2 hours ago

    A matrix is better represented as a nested list of lists:

       ((1 2 3)(4 5 6)(6 7 8))

    Of course you ignore that representing a tensor of rank higher than 2 is just as difficult in 2d as a matrix is in 1d.

  • Towaway69  6 hours ago

    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

    • lukan  4 hours ago

      "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  5 hours ago

      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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