Names

This week’s Tinderbox meetup was a deep dive into the meaning of names in Tinderbox. Each Tinderbox note has a name and a text space; the name is typically a short descriptive title and the text can as long as you like. What are the names for?

In the beginning, in Tinderbox’s Storyspace prehistory, the name was a way to identify which note was which on a small, low-resolution screen. In Storyspace 1, the title was a Str32 — a 32-character buffer — because there wasn’t a proper string library for Pascal in the 80s. (It wasn’t my fault, though most of the design errors since those days are.). I’m not sure it was done with much thought; I didn’t think much about it for a long time, beyond wanting to get rid of those fixed buffers.

The duality between title and text, though, has always been interesting. In afternoon, the titles are often in tension with the text. The note named “poetry” begins with a question: “ she asks, ”. Is this poetry? Is poetry more exact? Exactly what is the Name telling us?

But Names in Tinderbox let actions refer to other notes and use them as prototypes or as sources of data. If you want to do this, the naming of notes can be a difficult matter. For once thing, it becomes desirable for notes to have distinct names. For another, names that look like actions can cause trouble, just like little Bobby Tables.

In the forum, this prompted Andreas Grimm to raise the concept of Wittgenstein’s Ladder. Tinderbox tech support sometimes requires the philosophy of language.

(Speaking of early Tinderbox, I recently scrapped support for #operators, which were used in queries in Tinderbox 1-2 and have been deprecated for 20 years. “Surely,” I told myself, “no one is still using them!” Dear reader, this weblog was still using them, and the change broke my booklist for a time.)