Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49626718

Points: 433

# Comments: 124

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48297579

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44140349

Points: 221

# Comments: 78

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42984861

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

> The average person can hold roughly four such chunks in working memory. Once the cognitive load reaches this threshold, it becomes much harder to understand things.

This is a paraphrase of the scientific meaning. "Intrinsic" and "extrinsic" cognitive load are also terms of art coined by John Sweller in his studies of working memory in education.

I agree the article isn't designed to be peer-reviewed science. And I agree the article has real insights that resonate with working developers. But I'm also a fan of honesty in scientific communication. When we say "vaccines prevent disease", that's based on both an enormous amount of data as well as a relatively precise theory of how vaccines work biologically. But if we say "composition reduces cognitive load", that's just based on personal experience. I think it's valuable to separate out the strength of the evidence for these claims.

And I don't think condescension will make this a productive discussion!

I laid out my objections to the article last year when it first circulated: https://github.com/zakirullin/cognitive-load/issues/22

After developing the initial prototype you see in the webpage, I've since gone back to the drawing board. I'm working on developing a firmer foundation for issues like:

- How do you interleave content and computation? See: https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.04368

- How do different syntaxes make different document tasks easy, hard, or impossible? See: https://github.com/cognitive-engineering-lab/doclang-benchma...

I still very much believe in the high-level philosophy, but Nota will look very different within ~6 months. In the meantime, the single coolest development in the document language space is Typst, which I encourage you to check out: https://typst.app/

Also: the next version of Nota will be written 99% in Rust :-)

> Program tracing, or mentally simulating a program on concrete inputs, is an important part of general program comprehension. Programs involve many kinds of virtual state that must be held in memory, such as variable/value pairs and a call stack. In this work, we examine the influence of short-term working memory (WM) on a person's ability to remember program state during tracing. [...]

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34634855

Points: 2

# Comments: 1

There's a broader issue of layout, like if you want to print a Nota document and a figure is split across two pages. I'm not sure how to handle that, or if it even makes sense to. The goal of Nota is to move away from the paper document model, although people of course still like to print things and scribble on them.

* YAML for the page metadata (title: ...)

* Markdown (```{python}...```)

* Custom in-text notations (@fig-polar)

* Custom markdown notations (#| label: fig-polar)

Whereas in Nota, this would look like:

    %(export let metadata = {
      title: "matplotlib demo",
      format: {html: {codeFold: true}},
      jupyter: "python3"
    })

    For a demonstration of a line plot on a polar axis, see @Ref{fig-polar}.

    @Code[language=Python][label="fig-polar"][figCap="A line plot on a polar axis"]{
      import numpy as np
      import matplotlib.pyplot as plt

      r = np.arange(0, 2, 0.01)
      theta = 2 * np.pi * r
      fig, ax = plt.subplots(
        subplot_kw = {'projection': 'polar'} 
      )
      ax.plot(theta, r)
      ax.set_rticks([0.5, 1, 1.5, 2])
      ax.grid(True)
      plt.show()
    }

Note that Quarto's "#| fig-cap" annotation probably doesn't allow for rich text captions, since it only allows strings. But Nota allows deep composition, so you could do:

    @Code[figCap=@{A @strong{line plot} on a @em{polar axis}}]{
      ...
    }

Nota doesn't require users to specify the implementations of things like footnotes. The goal is the user just says "@Footnote{content}" and the document renderer takes care of all the layout. And you can swap in different implementations of the Footnote component.