Re: Perceptually true, Technically wrong?

[SteveFJong -at- aol -dot- com]

Samuel Choy <schoy -at- us -dot- ibm -dot- com> asks if we've ever written something that was 
perceptually true but technically wrong. Well, what is truth? (No, wait--I 
don't want to go down that path...)

Seriously, I think that much of what we write, particularly in software, is 
technically inaccurate. Many highly intelligent people had trouble with the 
Macintosh and its iconic user interface because the icons weren't really 
files but representations of files, and the talk of desktops and folders and 
clicking on buttons never mentioned the underlying command lines and disk 
structures. (I hope they've become comfortable with metaphorical writing in 
the last twenty years; or perhaps they all switched to Linux 8^)

Accuracy and precision are of course paramount considerations, so you must be 
careful in constructing your metaphors. But autistic precision is the enemy 
of metaphor, so if you let the engineers create a truly accurate description, 
it won't be very readable or understandable.

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