Quote:
Originally Posted by iNik
Interesting discussion, especially the thought of the differences between I may need to buy things at multiple stores, but generating a context for each is madness. If I'm going shopping, I don't want to dig through a million and six contexts to find what I need.
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Right, but would this really happen? Obviously if something can proliferate there’s a danger of it getting out of hand, but is this a reason for restriction to one? Sounds mighty timorous to me. Of course there’s a real danger of a tool that’s designed to help us get organized actually making things even more of a hassle, because you end up spending more time worrying over the tool than you did before when you were only confused by the plethora of tasks! (I think a lot of us forum posters are beginning to feel that about now!) But if this is true of potentially proliferating contexts, so it is also of being obliged to force everything into single contexts. More so, in my limited experience so far.
To follow your example above, shopping need not be madness because you can already use subcontexts in OF. So something can go under the general category of shopping or under a particular store and its there whether you’re going to that store or on a more general shopping trip. Multiple contexts would provide the same kind of flexibility but without restricting us to subcontexts within preexisting contexts, or jumping through hoops to make things fit. So, if I’m a film buff and I want to get hold of a newly released Kurosawa DVD, I can put it somewhere in “Shopping” and in “Murgatroyd” (because I know my mate Murgatroyd has a copy he could lend me), and in “film rental store” if I want to see if its available there (and I don’t want this under Shopping). Then, whether I‘m going shopping, or calling Murgartroyd about something else, or planning to go to Blockbusters for something lighter for the kids, it’s there and there’s no risk of forgetting it because it’s stuck immutably in one of the others.
Okay, stupid example, as they all tend to be, and my brain’s softening with too much time hanging out at the forum, but you see the point. This may involve some proliferation of contexts, but they can also be disposable or only activated in case of need, and surely it’s not beyond most of us to keep this in order. At least we had the nous to get OF, after all.
If I’ve missed something in all this, please come down on me like the proverbial ton of bricks. Meanwhile, I still want multiple contexts.
PS - Journey just posted - excellent. Couldn’t agree more.