[grahamlee]

I don't think that DX is harder than UX because developers somehow have a more complex task than everybody else, and that there's therefore a richer "experience" to navigate than in other domains. I think it's because developers tend to be developers, so are more aware of and willing to accept the nuances and complexities that go into development. In other words, we've got a more detailed understanding of the developer experience because, as developers, it's what we experience.

We accept the heritage of developer tools - the keyboard-driven interface that displays to a teletype emulator, the edit-compile-debug workflow - and build tools that improve the processes that have built around those legacies. This is why when something comes out of left field like Adele Goldberg and colleagues describing Smalltalk, we find it easy to adopt the approach to code organisation on offer and hard to adopt the image model, browser-based workflow, debugger-driven iteration, and other changes.

Meanwhile, when we go out into other domains, we use a little bit of understanding of that domain, a lot of reasoning by analogy, and an intention to "disrupt" what already exists and "eat the world", and create something that works very well for the spherical user in a vacuum without all of the detailed understanding that comes from having grown up in the system and learnt from people who grew up in it even longer ago.

[scroot]

A healthy exercise, I think, is to replace "developer" with "scribe" whenever we have these conversations. It becomes clear that in large part it is the overall culture that is missing the point -- which should be a kind of mass literacy. Smalltalk is a different universe indeed, but its goals were also completely different from today's. Its creators assumed that "using" a personal computer would be, in part, "programming" it, and they sought to define what that interaction would be like.

[werg]

We need to find our equivalent of a printing press! For what it's worth, possibly that won't be just one thing, but a wide array of tools?

[scroot]

> For what it's worth, possibly that won't be just one thing, but a wide array of tools?

We need to think hard about what reading and writing really are. These are the only technologies of their kind and they have had a completely different kind of qualitative effect on individuals and whole societies than other types of media and/or technical systems.

It brings up interesting questions. If you have a scribal culture, what are the interests of the community of scribes? Would they support easier writing systems, more amenable to learning by outsiders, or something more arcane that protects their cultural and social position (or something in between)?

Also what is the transition from one literate state to another like, what does it entail, how long does it take, and what kinds of "works" appear in the interregnum? In the Middle Ages the Universities in the west were largely concerned with endlessly rehashing Aristotle (a thinker on the border between orality and literacy) over and over, without coming up with original ideas. Is the enclosed community of developers today more like the scholastics than they'd care to admit?

There are stark differences between systems like Unix and those hinted at by Hypercard, Oberon, Smalltalk and the rest. It's like we know about the alphabet and what it is capable of, but the cultural inertia of complex cuneiform systems is too much to get past.

[wruza]

Isn’t that a circular feedback that leads nowhere? Developer like to be developers but being one doesn’t mean to make solutions and profits. Like a bureaucrat likes bureaucracy and then everything is bureaucracy under the hood sprayed with marketing sauce. Best stories of best products sound “we hacked, broke, short-cutted, ignored, made a fucking lots of money, and then rewrote fundamental instruments to match our needs”. Isn’t there a controversy with a nice cool environment that developers praise?