Mathematics often seems more discovered than invented; we're simply stumbling over things in a Platonic realm. Are there interface ideas with a similarly Platonic character, not so much invented as discovered?
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They often feel more contingent e.g. on our physiology, our culture, the nature of the information we prioritize representing. Things like rubber banding or pinch-to-zoom on a touch screen are so thumb-ish! But e.g. mutable linked representations are maybe more Platonic…
Perhaps there is So Much Plato (^TM) out there that our cultural and social positioning is the primary driver of what we get back. In other words, we're not stumbling over the rare conceptual rock, we invented the idea to notice the rocks and not the air, the dirt, the grass...
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Yeah, that aspect confuses the issue somewhat. For mutable linked repns, do you mean like mutable linked lists? Or do you have something else in mind?
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Oh, no, I mean e.g. connecting a slider and a figure, or connecting multiple differing figures representing the same data in different ways, as in worrydream.com/LadderOfAbstra and contemporaries. By "linked" I mean "linked parameterizations"—change param at one, read output at many.
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