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I too long for different ways of interacting with a computer. Unfortunately, I think the ship may have sailed as it's getting too hard to both start from scrat

I too long for different ways of interacting with a computer. Unfortunately, I think the ship may have sailed as it's getting too hard to both start from scratch and also provide support for everything from a web browser to drivers and so on. It was a lot easier when the to do list was 1/100th the size. The workaround is to utilize what has already been done, but then that kind of defeats the entire purpose and you just get a slightly different flavor of the same thing. The only other real option would be a radical revision of what a computer is. Something really simple that maybe a bit closer to what Carl Sasserath was doing with iOS (no, not Apple iOS, but the internet OS via Rebol thing) iirc, or what the Forth folks do with hardware. I think Alan Kay may have talked about this as well from a smalltalk perspective. The question is if you can do anything interesting with it. I'm sure there are dozens of us that would give up YouTube and social media to have a fully understandable computing system :)

DeathArrow 2y ago
>It was a lot easier when the to do list was 1/100th the size Things in the past look simple only if we look at them through today's lens. The apparent complexity was the same. Today I work with microservices, on top of Kubernetes on top of cloud services and I have to know a gazillion things. But I don't have the feeling that I had an easier time when I was a kid playing with C/C++ under DOS, learning assembly, writing terminate and stay resident programs, trying to write simple device drivers or trying to program the graphics hardware using whatever limited info I had access to. When I started doing desktop application using Win32 and Qt, it didn't seemed more simple than now. Learning how to use Linux syscalls, how to program for X11 in 2000 didn't seem simpler. Of course, software was much more simpler but now we have better tools, a lot of more easy accessible information, we have developed practices, standards and methodologies to help. And since we have huge resources, we don't have to extract every last drop of performance from the hardware. So, I don't think the life of average programmer in 70s,80s,90s,2000 was easier than now. It only seems easy if we have to resolve problems from 40 years ago using the knowledge, tools and the hardware we have now.
- 7thaccount 2y ago
  We may be talking past each other. I don't think it is harder on programmers now (or easier for programmers in the past). I can do things in Python that would make me a 10x programmer 40 years ago if the hardware could have supported it. They also didn't have stack overflow back then...just a dog-eared copy of some old C book. They didn't have hardware like we do that would've made a supercomputer back then look like something you'd put in a toaster today (that was a poorly worded sentence...sorry). The challenges they faced were numerous. My point is that the actual complexity layers are much worse now. Back in the Commodore 64 days, many users knew the machine inside and out. They could program in assembly, do graphics on the display...etc, all while understanding exactly what is going on. None of that was easy or as efficient as what I can do in Excel today or some 3D graphics program, but it was something you could wrap your head around. Today, we have huge monolithic amounts of code or hardware for everything. I don't understand anything about my hardware, I don't understand the millions of lines of windows, I don't understand the millions of lines in Microsoft Office, or how my web browser works or how Unreal engine was built...etc. It's the product of millions of people working together to create something beyond the limits of a single human. If we wanted to truly start from scratch, there's no way (that I can see) where we can reinvent all of that and actually get a large amount of users. It's not impossible, but Herculean. You could do something if the to-do list was MUCH smaller, like what was done with Temple OS or Collapse OS.
jodrellblank 2y ago
> "I too long for different ways of interacting with a computer." Like what? People built chording/pen/handwriting/gesture/Kinect/Wiimotes/multitouch/mouse gesture/swipe gesture/joysticks/Griffin Powermate/3Dconnextion Spacemouse/motion tracking/eye tracking/voice recognition/etc. on current operating systems, what do you want in the way of interaction that couldn't be built with a current OS?
- 7thaccount 2y ago
  I'm not talking about hardware devices. I'm talking about a very different combination of OS, hardware, and how applications are made and shared. Something closer to a Lisp/Smalltalk OS I guess, but that isn't really right either. Windows is a turd and Linux/Mac aren't perfect either. Sometimes I feel like it's turds all the way down. A lot of this is just my ignorance and hubris (I admit that), but I also feel like we somehow got off on the wrong foot and now we've built this terrifying and brittle tower of complexity.

DeathArrow 2y ago

>It was a lot easier when the to do list was 1/100th the size Things in the past look simple only if we look at them through today's lens. The apparent complexity was the same. Today I work with microservices, on top of Kubernetes on top of cloud services and I have to know a gazillion things. But I don't have the feeling that I had an easier time when I was a kid playing with C/C++ under DOS, learning assembly, writing terminate and stay resident programs, trying to write simple device drivers or trying to program the graphics hardware using whatever limited info I had access to. When I started doing desktop application using Win32 and Qt, it didn't seemed more simple than now. Learning how to use Linux syscalls, how to program for X11 in 2000 didn't seem simpler. Of course, software was much more simpler but now we have better tools, a lot of more easy accessible information, we have developed practices, standards and methodologies to help. And since we have huge resources, we don't have to extract every last drop of performance from the hardware. So, I don't think the life of average programmer in 70s,80s,90s,2000 was easier than now. It only seems easy if we have to resolve problems from 40 years ago using the knowledge, tools and the hardware we have now.

7thaccount 2y ago
We may be talking past each other. I don't think it is harder on programmers now (or easier for programmers in the past). I can do things in Python that would make me a 10x programmer 40 years ago if the hardware could have supported it. They also didn't have stack overflow back then...just a dog-eared copy of some old C book. They didn't have hardware like we do that would've made a supercomputer back then look like something you'd put in a toaster today (that was a poorly worded sentence...sorry). The challenges they faced were numerous. My point is that the actual complexity layers are much worse now. Back in the Commodore 64 days, many users knew the machine inside and out. They could program in assembly, do graphics on the display...etc, all while understanding exactly what is going on. None of that was easy or as efficient as what I can do in Excel today or some 3D graphics program, but it was something you could wrap your head around. Today, we have huge monolithic amounts of code or hardware for everything. I don't understand anything about my hardware, I don't understand the millions of lines of windows, I don't understand the millions of lines in Microsoft Office, or how my web browser works or how Unreal engine was built...etc. It's the product of millions of people working together to create something beyond the limits of a single human. If we wanted to truly start from scratch, there's no way (that I can see) where we can reinvent all of that and actually get a large amount of users. It's not impossible, but Herculean. You could do something if the to-do list was MUCH smaller, like what was done with Temple OS or Collapse OS.

jodrellblank 2y ago

> "I too long for different ways of interacting with a computer." Like what? People built chording/pen/handwriting/gesture/Kinect/Wiimotes/multitouch/mouse gesture/swipe gesture/joysticks/Griffin Powermate/3Dconnextion Spacemouse/motion tracking/eye tracking/voice recognition/etc. on current operating systems, what do you want in the way of interaction that couldn't be built with a current OS?

7thaccount 2y ago
I'm not talking about hardware devices. I'm talking about a very different combination of OS, hardware, and how applications are made and shared. Something closer to a Lisp/Smalltalk OS I guess, but that isn't really right either. Windows is a turd and Linux/Mac aren't perfect either. Sometimes I feel like it's turds all the way down. A lot of this is just my ignorance and hubris (I admit that), but I also feel like we somehow got off on the wrong foot and now we've built this terrifying and brittle tower of complexity.