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by scroot 2304 days ago
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.
1 comments
werg 2304 days ago
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?
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scroot 2304 days ago
> 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.

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