<@UC2A2ARPT> and <@U05SU27S1M2> mentioned “...hand...
# thinking-togetherg
guitarvydas
09/19/2023, 1:24 AM@Ivan Reese and @Alex McLean mentioned “...hand drawn programming environments...“. The first thing that I think of when I hear this is “whiteboards”. What are the dimensions involved in whiteboards? x/y/t. T goes forwards (e.g. adding new details by drawing them in over time) and backwards (erasing parts of drawings). Iteration. Scrubbing.
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Ivan Reese
09/19/2023, 6:16 AM
My current experience is that polar coordinates are more meaningfully expressive than Cartesian. But is suppose it depends on what you're trying to do. Time, for sure.
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Alex McLean
09/19/2023, 6:53 AMI like to make mostly stateless systems so that time takes care of itself. You can also treat qualities like the spikiness/compactness etc of shapes as more dimensions, and calculate things based on proximity to each other rather than a global x/y. I am working with a whiteboard tabletop, adding a plotter for feedback.
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wtaysom
09/19/2023, 7:45 PMTurtle graphics for the win!
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guitarvydas
09/20/2023, 10:12 AMI would love to know more about your thoughts on polar coords, but, ATM I can’t even formulate a reasonable question... @Ivan Reese
guitarvydas
09/20/2023, 10:13 AMI keep mentioning “time”, because I learned a deep secret when I was breaking my brain trying to understand Denotational Semantics. The secret is: be very explicit and make everything very explicit as you think. Then, you can always wrap syntactic skins over the stuff, in order to elide the concepts that you think should be elided. In my mind, you can’t know what to elide if you don’t know - explicitly - what you’re dealing with. I guess that this is a kind of Physicist perspective - I want to know what makes things tick, I want to know what the Atoms are. Synthesizing better UXs is easier when you begin with a bag filled with Atoms.
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Alex McLean
09/20/2023, 10:16 AMOne nice thing about polar coordinates is that there's no way 'up', so interfaces afford collaboration with people around a table
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guitarvydas
09/20/2023, 10:44 AMHmm, so here’s a question, sort-of... In my mind a “tensor” is just a 3D polar coordinate. Is that relevant here?