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This was the view of "what personal computing would be like" held by the original LRG team at PARC. There would be no distinction between "user" and "programmer

by scroot 7y ago

This was the view of "what personal computing would be like" held by the original LRG team at PARC. There would be no distinction between "user" and "programmer," since using the system would at some level involve some type of programming. All of today's computing culture and the systems we use heavily reflect the opposite view. It's hard for us to imagine, since programming is a kind of scribal trade.

ken 7y ago
I disagree that all of our computing systems keep them apart. We’ve got systems like Bash, and Excel. Even when I’m not doing “programming”, I’m doing programming. I wish more systems had that flexibility. Even when the average user isn’t writing programs in it (like the web), all of the long-lived platforms today are programmable.
- scroot 7y ago
  > all of the long-lived platforms today are programmable Sure, programmable by what today we'd call "programmers" but certainly not by "users." This is because programming has become a niche trade (as I said before, like a scribal culture). I'll give an example. Most users' experience with their host Operating System involves prodigious use of buttons. They know how buttons work and they know how to interact with them. But in all these OSes it is extremely difficult for a user to make a button that does something they want, then, say, place it on their desktop for future use. In the past there were really good attempts at authorship in computing media (which is more like what the LRG was going for with Smalltalk etc), including Hypercard. In the latter system, you could pop open a button and see how it worked in a comprehensible scripting language. You could copy the button and paste it somewhere else. You cannot do any of this with buttons in the major OSes. The capability is not there.* The only option available to "users" is to learn a full fledged, general purpose programming language with all the pitfalls that entails, which means learning build systems and all the rest. At that point they have to become what today we call a "programmer," ie a scribal-programmer. Our dominant systems have been explicitly designed for a strict delineation between scribal-programmers and consumer-users. That's the rub. * - AppleScript is a so-so attempt at this, but even that has been allowed to die on the vine.
  - sergeykish 7y ago
    I have a dream of such system http://sergeykish.com/live-pages http://sergeykish.com/live-pages - edit in browser, simple code, inspectable with its own controls. It's fun, it's not enterprisy, it's unpredictable and sadly not polished (and not published)

by scroot 7y ago

ken 7y ago

I disagree that all of our computing systems keep them apart. We’ve got systems like Bash, and Excel. Even when I’m not doing “programming”, I’m doing programming. I wish more systems had that flexibility. Even when the average user isn’t writing programs in it (like the web), all of the long-lived platforms today are programmable.

scroot 7y ago
> all of the long-lived platforms today are programmable Sure, programmable by what today we'd call "programmers" but certainly not by "users." This is because programming has become a niche trade (as I said before, like a scribal culture). I'll give an example. Most users' experience with their host Operating System involves prodigious use of buttons. They know how buttons work and they know how to interact with them. But in all these OSes it is extremely difficult for a user to make a button that does something they want, then, say, place it on their desktop for future use. In the past there were really good attempts at authorship in computing media (which is more like what the LRG was going for with Smalltalk etc), including Hypercard. In the latter system, you could pop open a button and see how it worked in a comprehensible scripting language. You could copy the button and paste it somewhere else. You cannot do any of this with buttons in the major OSes. The capability is not there.* The only option available to "users" is to learn a full fledged, general purpose programming language with all the pitfalls that entails, which means learning build systems and all the rest. At that point they have to become what today we call a "programmer," ie a scribal-programmer. Our dominant systems have been explicitly designed for a strict delineation between scribal-programmers and consumer-users. That's the rub. * - AppleScript is a so-so attempt at this, but even that has been allowed to die on the vine.
- sergeykish 7y ago
  I have a dream of such system http://sergeykish.com/live-pages http://sergeykish.com/live-pages - edit in browser, simple code, inspectable with its own controls. It's fun, it's not enterprisy, it's unpredictable and sadly not polished (and not published)