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"Do we continue to dumb down software to exclusive casual usage for house-moms or we try to move our society to be more techn savy as we are clearly moving to a
by linguae 6y ago
"Do we continue to dumb down software to exclusive casual usage for house-moms or we try to move our society to be more techn savy as we are clearly moving to a more tech relying world. Why shouldn't everyone know how to code?"
To quote a commonly-used Web meme: "Why not both?"
In my opinion, why should a software tool only have one interface to it? What if there were many possible interfaces available, from very simple interfaces with reasonable defaults for casual users, to more option-rich interfaces for power users, to an API for programmers. What if we could take advantage of today's AI technology to automatically construct GUIs that are tailored to a user's experience level? What if users could customize the GUIs in order to make the GUI fit their needs better?
What if the system supported a variety of languages, not only common languages such as Python that many programmers are familiar with, but also beginner-friendly languages? Users are willing to program provided it's not too difficult: AppleScript from the 1990s was a step in the right direction, and Excel's macro language is probably the most widely-used programming language in the world. With today's AI/NLP technology, we could go further by developing ways for users to describe repetitive, routine tasks using natural language.
I think there's still a lot of room for innovation on the desktop. But you highlight a very big problem: where is the market? Who is going to pay for this innovation? Outside of open-source projects, the major commercial desktop environments are platforms controlled by multi-billion dollar corporations. Building a new desktop environment that is capable of competing against the commercial giants will take a lot of time and capital. The last company to give this a try was Be, Inc. in the mid-1990s, and they had a hard time competing against Microsoft's OEM strategy. I wrote more about this at http://mmcthrow-musings.blogspot.com/2020/10/where-did-personal-computing-go-wrong.html http://mmcthrow-musings.blogspot.com/2020/10/where-did-perso....