| > The point I am making here is that Engelbart and Kay were unrealistic in expecting that their technologies would give quick results in the way of Tools for Thought. They had no appreciation for the vast and rich culture that produced the tools for thought enabled by the traditional technologies of writing and printing. They did not realize that a similar culture needs to arise around a new technology with augmentation potential. I am guilty of deifying Englebart and Kay, and castigating "our society" for failing them. After my honeymoon period with the "tool of thought" people, I've calmed down. Here's my radical belief: portability is for people who can't write their own programs. (copped from a Torvalds witticism) Consider writing and literacy: If you really grow up in a literate culture, you can start with a blank page and end with a bespoke document that suits your needs. If you don't grow up in that, you have to modify others' documents. This limits you. Hallmark cards are for people who can't write poetically (no judgment intended). So too for programming. Today we rely on hundreds of millions of lines of code of others we can't even realistically modify. But I think the future resembles Forth: in less than a hundred lines of code, you write something that suits your needs[0]. You can't do this yet because computers suck. I'm talking loosely and at a high-level. [0] I think Forth is a powerful vision for the future: no operating system, no types, no compatibility, no syntax. An executable english language. |