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I wholeheartedly agree. In some ways, iOS and its spinoff iPadOS are the complete opposite of the vision that Apple pursued in the 1990s (before Steve Jobs' re

I wholeheartedly agree. In some ways, iOS and its spinoff iPadOS are the complete opposite of the vision that Apple pursued in the 1990s (before Steve Jobs' return) of scriptable, composable software through AppleScript and OpenDoc, which themselves were influenced by the everything-is-an-object world of Smalltalk. Sadly AppleScript isn't supported by all Mac applications and it seems to be rather deemphasized these days, and OpenDoc was killed in its infancy upon Steve Jobs' return. The iPhone and iPad are fine platforms; I use them regularly for my work. However, they are a far cry from Alan Kay's Dynabook idea. A better base for developing on the Dynabook idea would be the Microsoft Surface line of tablets, which can run the full versions of Windows 10 Home or Pro and thus can run modern Smalltalk implementations such as Squeak or Pharo. I wish there were more work done in the area of composable GUIs, where the core logic of applications is scriptable and where these elements can be combined in ways that could be even more expressive than Unix pipes are. Every now and then I have thoughts about taking a modern Smalltalk implementation and writing a suite of composable GUI apps as a demonstration of this idea. This topic always takes me back to a Hacker News comment I read many years ago (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13573373 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13573373) about composable software versus monolithic applications and how commercial software companies are predisposed to support the latter while the free software movement should have focused on the former. I still don't think it's too late, however, as long as there are some vendors selling hardware that users can install their own software on without needing to use a certified app store.

scroot 7y ago
> commercial software companies are predisposed to support the latter while the free software movement should have focused on the former. There is a related issue at play here when it comes to how systems are developed. It takes an enormous amount of sustained effort and time to create whole computing systems (hardware, OS, design, etc). The FOSS movement is not really capable by definition of doing this, since it is dispersed and not funded at the level that today's major platforms have been funded. This is precisely why FOSS is so Unix-centric: that is the predominant and free OS that was available at the time the whole movement really came about. It would take a years-long, well funded research effort to build a truly new computing environment. On the technical side, the desire and some of the knowledge is there. We simply lack funders that are willing to pony up a good amount to the right people and leave them alone. That is was ARPA, PARC, and Bell Labs were able to do in their time, and the disappearance of this kind of funding environment is exactly why we are still reiterating on the accomplishments of those institutions today.
postpress 7y ago
> I wish there were more work done in the area of composable GUIs, where the core logic of applications is scriptable and where these elements can be combined in ways that could be even more expressive than Unix pipes are. Every now and then I have thoughts about taking a modern Smalltalk implementation and writing a suite of composable GUI apps as a demonstration of this idea. Where the browser is the platform, you might consider using custom elements to fill this role: https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/custom-elements.html#custom-elements https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/custom-elements.html#...

scroot 7y ago

> commercial software companies are predisposed to support the latter while the free software movement should have focused on the former. There is a related issue at play here when it comes to how systems are developed. It takes an enormous amount of sustained effort and time to create whole computing systems (hardware, OS, design, etc). The FOSS movement is not really capable by definition of doing this, since it is dispersed and not funded at the level that today's major platforms have been funded. This is precisely why FOSS is so Unix-centric: that is the predominant and free OS that was available at the time the whole movement really came about. It would take a years-long, well funded research effort to build a truly new computing environment. On the technical side, the desire and some of the knowledge is there. We simply lack funders that are willing to pony up a good amount to the right people and leave them alone. That is was ARPA, PARC, and Bell Labs were able to do in their time, and the disappearance of this kind of funding environment is exactly why we are still reiterating on the accomplishments of those institutions today.

postpress 7y ago

> I wish there were more work done in the area of composable GUIs, where the core logic of applications is scriptable and where these elements can be combined in ways that could be even more expressive than Unix pipes are. Every now and then I have thoughts about taking a modern Smalltalk implementation and writing a suite of composable GUI apps as a demonstration of this idea. Where the browser is the platform, you might consider using custom elements to fill this role: https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/custom-elements.html#custom-elements https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/custom-elements.html#...