Fundamental Medium
What is the fundamental medium for representing information? Noodle was in part an attempt to answer that question. It was my thinking that something like noodle was needed to be able to express ideas generically.
Of course I know there is no such thing as a canonical symbolic system. Language is a dance with multiple layers. Different mechanisms of language become useful or important in different circumstances. The inflection in the voice, the connotation of words with similar meanigns, the musicality of the phrasing, the pauses, the form, the historical references, the philosophical echoes. Language in its generic, true, form, is formless in that it isn’t constrained to phonetics, symbols, or high abstraction. It can be simple and mundane. It can be onematopaïc. It can be flowery and meandering or deadly precise.
Nevertheless, in technical contexts there is the emergence of useful abstraction layers mechanisms for precisely describing systems or functionality. Programming languages, CAD, simulations, system tools, and mathematics libraries are the key to mastering technology. The UNIX philosophy set a standard about what a program ought to be and how information should exist in a system. But of course its just another standard among others. There’s no such thing as a “plain text file”. Just look at the chaos of unicode.
But just like with foundational mythology you’ll see a concentration of functionality, and technical effort around certain abstraction layers. Late platonism was fleshed out and associated to figures from pagan mythology. Later effectively reformulated in Chrsitian and Muslim theology. The Bible was the first book off the printing press. The english language, not really Shakespear’s english anymore (high-schoolers need a translation) slowly becoming the language of the internet in becoming defined by the internet. Not unlike POSIX-ish environments with “familiar” and interoperable utilities from the previous century propping up modern web-infrastructure despite all the complex containerization and caching that goes on.
The point I’m trying to make is that there are abstraction layers that have value because of their localization with respect to other useful abstraction layers. But how do you map that out? And how do you map it out in a way that doesn’t require you to move away from established formats and tools too much.
A compromise between these types of considerations are what brought me to noodle. I don’t think it’s possible to replace the versatility of “plain text” in that it captures natural language with all its ever-changing dimmensions so effortlessly. But I believe noodle allows a non-linear augmentation that text is bound to. This is of course not unique to noodle. There are all sorts of “networked thinking” apps out there. I think what sets noodle apart is the idea of working directly with that structure and having access to a version of networked thinking that is augmented again with the idea of nesting. In this way noodle lives in an interesting intersection between plain text notes, networked thinking, and the filesystem.
When it comes to communication, I think the linear form is irreplaceable. For mapping and consolidation of knowledge, networks are irreplaceable. The relationship between symbol, context, and transformation, makes nestedness is irreplaceable.
Linear is necessary. Network is compact. Nesting is flexible.