Comment by Barrin92
2 hours ago
I genuinely do wonder why that has been the trajectory. When you look at the almost futuristic vision of interacting with living, programmable software objects and environments that evolve over time and you get a glimpse of it in Emacs, Pharo or Oberon (worth mentioning Free Oberon, fun to play around with https://free.oberon.org/en/ think it was on the frontpage recently), how did we go back to dead text files again?
I always have to think the "the world if" meme when I think about what would have happened if the whole Engelbart, Licklider, Alan Kay school of thought had won out
> how did we go back to dead text files again?
We never went away from it. It's how a significant amount of computer use has always been. Smalltalk, Oberon, Lisp Machines (mentioned by sibling), they were always minority systems.
There was a brief time when maybe home computers could have leaned this way, but that lasted until VisiCalc. What sold computers was software that turned them from clay to be molded by the user into a defined tool. People prefer appliances (or were convinced to prefer appliances), and appliances make more money for businesses than distributing programs as a Smalltalk package would have.
> I genuinely do wonder why that has been the trajectory.
The simple answer here is still likely the best one: Smalltalk and Lisp Machine systems were expensive and proprietary right at the same time that Unix and C became free (and therefore ran everywhere)