In Google Maps, the ability to zoom relies heavily in a (unacknowledged) property of the problem domain: planar geometry. If every relevant detail is nicely clustered together and, more importantly, every irrelevant detail is nicely clustered far away from wherever you are zoomming-in, then sure!
If, on the other hand, you cannot ever be 100% sure that fixing one stop light in Brooklyn will cause a bunch sewage lines to flush out to the street in Long Island, then zooming does more harm than good. At the end of day, you need the map to conform to the realities of the territory. If that gets in the way of that pretty abstraction of yours, then the abstraction - not reality - is wrong. And when that is the case, you need to start over and make a better map.
Text based toolchains are, for all their limitations, a (sufficiently) reality conformant map. It does not mean there cannot be others; but as of today I do not know about any suitable candidate.
If, on the other hand, you cannot ever be 100% sure that fixing one stop light in Brooklyn will cause a bunch sewage lines to flush out to the street in Long Island, then zooming does more harm than good. At the end of day, you need the map to conform to the realities of the territory. If that gets in the way of that pretty abstraction of yours, then the abstraction - not reality - is wrong. And when that is the case, you need to start over and make a better map.
Text based toolchains are, for all their limitations, a (sufficiently) reality conformant map. It does not mean there cannot be others; but as of today I do not know about any suitable candidate.
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