Neal Stephenson's essay "In the Beginning was the Command Line" has this bit: > Americans' preference for mediated experiences is obvious enough, and I'm not g

Neal Stephenson's essay "In the Beginning was the Command Line" has this bit: > Americans' preference for mediated experiences is obvious enough, and I'm not going to keep pounding it into the ground. I'm not even going to make snotty comments about it—after all, I was at Disney World as a paying customer. But it clearly relates to the colossal success of GUIs and so I have to talk about it some. Disney does mediated experiences better than anyone. If they understood what OSes are, and why people use them, they could crush Microsoft in a year or two. There's so much expertise in animation, games, 3D, physics, illustration etc while most UIs are boring, boxy, and slow. The UIs inside of simulated computers in computer games are cooler than the actual UIs! I wonder what will happen with virtual reality UIs. With movement tracking you could really get next-level point and click. I want my IDE to be a VR spaceship mission where I write code with some kind of sign language syntax!