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insufferablejake comments on Sensual Experience - Less Wrong
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It was tried countless times: Visual programming languages. It never worked outside some specific application domains.
Keep in mind that text is a visual representation. It is a visual representation optimized to express our thoughts, trivial or complex, in a precise, efficient, and succint way. We went from making artistic cave paintings and wood carvings to writing simple, standardized characters.
Programming is about expressing how to do something in an extremely precise way, so precise that it can be understood by a machine with little or no intelligence.
Non-textual media might provide an aid when communicating between intelligent humans, and even there it is often used for superficial communication (e.g. advertising). When you need precision, text is probably the most effective choice.
I agree with you in that text is a visual representation of 'units' of ideas, if I were to be not very precise about this, that we string together to convey more complex ideas. And I agree with you that in the kind of complex scaffolding of little ideas into big ones ad. infinitum, that happens in computer science, that the kind of 'coding' medium I was suggesting, would be inefficient. But still the idea has a novelty for us humans who are more at home with spatially manipulating objects and stringing them together as opposed to doing all of this in abstract space.