Comment by dgb23
3 years ago
A related thought: I sometimes think how cool it would be if some of the empowering ideas from the smalltalk and lisp communities (think Xerox, Symbolics etc.) would push personal and end user computing forward.
HCI seems generally stagnant or at least the real world influences. Apple managed to extract and distill the UX portions, but their products lack the empowerment aspect. Linux is kind of the opposite of that.
I feel like there are so many problems with end user computing, specifically because every program defines its own little world. Nothing is integrated well, most things are incredibly hard and shaky to integrate and extend. So much time and effort is wasted because of lock-in effects and feature bloat.
Also we’re missing out on large portions of users solving their own problems, bringing in their expertise and creativity to computing instead of their frustrations.
There's a lot of assumptions in this comment about (a) what people want (b) what people are willing to do (c) the conceptual level at which "integration" can and should take place.
Look at other tools (non-computational). The story there doesn't look much like what you're proposing. Maybe there's agreement on lumber and thread sizing, but in general, tools do not interoperate much. Whatever level of integration they do have comes mostly from having to interface with the physical universe. In addition, most people don't know how to use most tools, and things are broadly left to experts ("tradesmen").