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Comment by imgabe | Hacker News Reader

Blueprints/schematics are far, far superior at conveying the information they do compared to a written narrative. Given the ease of preparing written text compared to drawing schematics nobody would go to the trouble of doing so if that weren't the case.

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Of course, all of the pieces of information that blueprints and schematics are conveying are 2D layouts. Once you're out of the realm of things whose forms can be reproduced at reduced scale, or simplified to functional equivalents that lie on a plane, the types of useful visual representations of things are sharply reduced; they become extremely stylized, and symbolic. At that point, you've basically arrived at language again.

An interesting angle on the topic comes from my father who at one time was a project manager and designer in the construction industry. In the days before computers he would painstakingly hand-draw the design that was reproduced as blueprints, that was the role of the "draftsman".

But the drawing wasn't the source of stress, rather it was the project "specification" that he sweated. The issue was the spec was a legal, text-format document detailing the size of beams, type of wire, plumbing, fixtures, etc. He had to assure that beams were sufficient to support structure, electrical wiring was safe and up to code, etc. A mistake could expose the contractor and himself to legal liability if a component failed, so an accurate spec was a task he took seriously.

Of course the subject of program specifications is commonly discussed, though often doesn't have the same significance that my father experienced. I guess in most cases program crashes don't have the same impact that a roof caving in would entail. In situations where crashing can't be tolerated, the spec will mean a whole lot more.

I work in the same construction design industry. The drawings themselves are also contractually binding. Many smaller jobs forgo the written specifications altogether.

My father had mostly worked on larger projects, like tract houses and the like. Of course, times change, my recollection was of how things were a long time ago. My comment was just illustrating an instance where relying on a text description was still important even though there was a graphic format as well.

Your info was relevant to the idea of that at some level of complexity it becomes necessary to use text vs. only graphic presentation. Maybe in construction that occurs when there are more than a few elevations to juggle, but you probably know much more about it than me.

If you had a blueprint of the whole of NewYork city, you surely would need some tool to abstract away the maze of individual lines and be able to refer-to/work-with concepts like "Central Park", "the Harlem", or "Brooklyn Bridge".

It is not about how much more information can we convey, but how much less data must be expended to present a tractable model of reality to the human operator. Conveying more details is worse than useless, it results in informationi overload and cognitive stagnation.

Historically, the way it happened in computer programming is those tools are text based. This is as much about the early use of computers as clerical aids to process business data, and the early synergies between computation and linguistics. Maybe it can be done, but it will require millions of man hours to accomplish. And almost nobody wants to invest in doing so because of the cost of opportunity.

Of course, there's the ability to zoom and pan to get the appropriate level of detail. There's a reason Google Maps isn't a text adventure.

In Google Maps, the ability to zoom relies heavily in a (unacknowledged) property of the problem domain: planar geometry. If every relevant detail is nicely clustered together and, more importantly, every irrelevant detail is nicely clustered far away from wherever you are zoomming-in, then sure!

If, on the other hand, you cannot ever be 100% sure that fixing one stop light in Brooklyn will cause a bunch sewage lines to flush out to the street in Long Island, then zooming does more harm than good. At the end of day, you need the map to conform to the realities of the territory. If that gets in the way of that pretty abstraction of yours, then the abstraction - not reality - is wrong. And when that is the case, you need to start over and make a better map.

Text based toolchains are, for all their limitations, a (sufficiently) reality conformant map. It does not mean there cannot be others; but as of today I do not know about any suitable candidate.

When I write "2.5 mm" this is not narrative. If you want to explain "2.5 mm" without using text, how would you do that? The only way to do it is to use something literal from the real world. That's what we're talking about when we're comparing blueprints to programming. I think the word is literal. Can't avoid the need for text when it's precision we're after.

> Blueprints/schematics are far, far superior at conveying the information they do compared to a written narrative.

Blueprints don't change as much as software does. It's not generally interesting to diff, fork, reformat, or patch a blueprint.

Hmm, I don't think you've ever worked on designing a building. Being able to diff two sets of plans would be hugely beneficial.

Graphics can be useful in some domains but nothing beats text in the general case.

Just imagine a compiler that scans your diagram written by hand on a piece of paper, translate it into AST then interpret it or even produce an executable.

And then realize that your diagram was misinterpreted and you have a big bug in said executable.

It used to be that CPUs were designed with schematics (drawings). Today, they seem to be designed with text (VHDL or Verilog). I wonder why?

Basically all other electronics is developed with schematics though.

Why do you think textbooks (and ancient works) are written in text, not comics?

Why do you think Euclid drew diagrams and didn't write everything out in text?

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