On Wed, Dec 28, 2011 at 11:59 AM, Offray Vladimir Luna Cárdenas <[email protected]> wrote:
Many thanks for these comments. You have touched on the big picture of Leo more clearly than I have. It's all too easy to get bogged down in the minutia: file formats, bugs, commands, etc. > the more I live in Leo, the more I > see plain text with markup and files in general as a "degradation" of the > meta-structure that Leo provides to the plain files world. This is the heart of the matter. Leo is attempting to raise the level of discourse, so that structure is first-class (intrinsic) data. But our existing tools are all oriented to the "degraded" (flat) world. Thus, Leo must do a lot of heavy lifting in the background. It's easy to forget that there is something besides the heavy lifting that is the real point of Leo. > Leo, like Smalltalk, is trying to > solve a fundamental problem in dealing with computers...The problem is that > most people see or use the "degraded" flat world. And that brings a related > problem: how to communicate with that world and how to make more people use > and understand the meta-structure of non-flat world and move to that place. > Trying to put metadata on flat-world and make connections on it, would be > almost as reinventing Leo or xml (which, by the way I don't like either) or > adding a lot of helper files to put metastructure in flat files, and still > you would lose the viewing capabilities of trees, seeing only the "flat > leafs of files". This is an excellent summary of Leo's history, and *many* discussions of sentinels. The inescapable conclusion is that sentinels (metadata) *must* be part of external files. Or more generally, there is *no* real possibility of simulating Leo outlines in the "degraded world". > So how that potential users who would come after you or me, > and who are unfamiliar with Leo will deal with the advantages that Leo > provides while make connections with their tools/data? Leo could survive in two ways. First, as a standalone tool. This may or many not happen after I am gone. It will depend entirely on Leo's users. Second, as something that stimulates better ways of using data. In this possible new world, the "flat" data would be entirely hidden from ordinary users; just like assembly language is hidden from C++ programmers, or .pyo files are hidden from ordinary Python programmers. Obviously, this new world would require some kind of support *outside* of Leo. Perhaps some kind of standard for embedding metadata in (text) files. Perhaps something else. I don't see this happening, and I certainly am not in a position to make it happen. But it *could* happen, if the right organization got behind it. > I imagine a world where deconstructing textual computer interaction the Leo > way would be the standard. We're far away, specially with Leo self-fulfilled > prophesy of being a developer's tool for developers, but carrying Leo to new > contexts will be a way to explore the path to futures like that one. Exactly. Edward -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "leo-editor" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/leo-editor?hl=en.
