| I succumb to these emotions from time to time, but it's worth noting that—software wise—you can certainly live in the past we hoped we'd have if you put in a modicum of effort: Plan 9: actively maintained, runs well in a VM: http://plan9.bell-labs.com/plan9/ Smalltalk: many options, notably Pharo: http://www.pharo-project.org Lisp machine emulators: http://www.unlambda.com/ Haiku is approaching a 1.0 release quickly: http://haiku-os.org/ And of course you can have a "real" keyboard if you desire, such as the Kinesis Ergo: http://www.kinesis-ergo.com/ Switching to this keyboard and the Dvorak layout is certainly an upgrade from consumer to professional equipment and, requiring about a month to retrain, will certainly dispel the illusion that discomfort is an essential and missing part of acquiring expertise at computing. The fact that I type faster than my peers makes the fact that I write code much more slowly than them all the more bizarre. I'd love to know why superior technologies fail to conquer markets, particularly enabling technologies like Smalltalk, but my point is that our man Stanislav has no excuse: they exist now and he knows about them and can use them right now if he wants. Instead he seems to be embarking on some kind of ambitious hardware project. Good luck to him on that, but if his definition of success greatly exceeds (say) CoffeeScript or BeOS's success, he can expect failure, regardless of how long his ideas endure or how influential they are. |