Similar problem statement: Ideal OS

Also Microsoft OLE comes to mind.

See also the work that Jef Raskin was prevented from doing at Apple that ended up in the doomed Canon Cat system (cf his book 'The Humane Interface')

Mariano Guerra The summary looks good. How much did you edit it?

removed a couple items and trailing sentences that didn't add much

after reading the article of course 😄

At the risk of a party foul -- did you mean 'pique' not 'pick'?

Kartik Agaram probably, not sure about the correct spelling 😄

Yeah just trying to understand what you meant..

should I fix it and make your comment stale? 😛

In my opinion this is the wrong way going about breaking silos. What we need is a separation of data and apps. If data is always examinable (an open binary format), you can have different apps accessing the same data, transforming it and pass to other apps. (Unix philosophy). This data can be live too and versioned. Apps would need to be stateless. Unfortunatly that goes against companies interests, so we can't have nice things.

Just look at places where we don't have silos. Like image manipulation, some 3d, email.. and of course text.. there we have a strong standardization of data formats.

Bracha's Newspeak is part of the Smalltalk family. In Smalltalk, there is no data. There are only objects, and the only way to access objects is by "sending messages", which just means calling methods. Put differently: there's no data, only APIs. Data representation/format is alway an implementation detail.

This view has its good and bad sides, of course. The main disadvantage is the violation of the Rule of Least Power, because the least-power-notation in this framing is a Turing-complete programming language. One consequence is that interoperability requires agreement on the programming language rather than just on a few data formats.

"take the hardest and most profound thing you need to do, make it great, and then build every easier thing out of it"

-- worrydream.com/EarlyHistoryOfSmalltalk

Sounds like a philosophical difference with the Rule of Least Power 😂

And that's why smalltalk or object oriented programming in general are a terrible idea. I think they work great in the small to abstract away the insides of say a string. Unfortunatly that was so successfull, that we just ran with it. Now we have input fields, inside boxes and panes inside windows, inside apps, inside companies. And all of this defaults having no access to the data.

That's not what happens in Smalltalk systems. There's a single memory space in which all objects live. No app boundaries. Tying things together into something new is straightforward. With modern UIs, such as Glamorous Toolkit, that's true even for GUI elements.

The problem is, of course, that all this harmonious co-existence works only for code written not only in Smalltalk, but in the same Smalltalk variant (there are many). It's the 1970s idea of a single ideal computing system that everyone will adopt because it's "best" that hasn't worked out. And once you need interoperability between systems designed with different priorities, you need weak coupling and the Rule of Least Power (which also has advantages inside something like a Smalltalk image, but that's a different story).

I find Gilad Bracha's vision of composable apps in Newspeak very credible. I just doubt that many people would adopt it, even if there were polished implementation. It's just too weird for most people to even look at.

The real issue is encapsulation. The authority of ones data is at the mercy of the object or the app.

The owner of the data is also supposed to be the owner of the object/class. In the Smalltalk philosophy, generic data structures are always an implementation detail. There's always a class specificallly for your application data, and that's a class you own.

I started off my reply by disagreeing with this: "If a meme which encases your perspective cannot be replicated to even one other person over the web, then it's done, that won't exist in the future. Failed meme."

"discovering stuff and explaining stuff are VERY different skills"

I can! 👋 That’s how I’ve had so many interesting conversations here. It’s a lovely reality check that other people who feel this way disagree with my vision. :)

Hi Stefan Lesser can you explain this in this context?

Bias statement: I am not good at certainty, no matter which topic.

That said, I am particuarly reluctant to attribute any certainty to ideas about the future of programming because that future will be determined by lots of forces: technical, social, political, environmental, etc. Unless you are considering the very near future (say, five years from now), I find it hard to be certain about anything.

Duncan Cragg I’m just trying to be funny and thought throwing a reference to Dunning-Kruger (in meme-form!) into this thread would provide some… entertainment.

Konrad Hinsen demonstrates it well. The people I know who are brilliant at what they do and have all the competency to be confident about, would never claim that they are certain about anything. And from my own experience I can only say that I’m beginning to understand how you get more and more uncertain, the deeper you dig and the more you realize how much more there is you don’t know enough about.

I’m not entertained by being made the butt of jokes about Dunning-Kruger and “Peak of Mount Stupid”.

Tom Lieber don't take it personally, if you're like me with off-the-scale hubris, you'll assume that you're up on that plateau there!

Actually my own graph is a more-or-less monotonic increase of confidence with competence: the more I know, the more I know I'm right.

I do actually strongly suspect that my lack of humility explains my 100% failure to convince anyone else that I'm right, but there's nothing I can do about that, sadly...

Tom Lieber Look, what do I know? I have no idea what you’re working on. Any of us could potentially make some commit to GitHub tomorrow and change the world. If you feel confident that you’re on a good path, then good for you. And I see no reason why you couldn’t have put all the effort in to have made it way past the slope of enlightenment.

Just thought it would be useful to be aware of this effect, not necessarily to place yourself on that diagram (which technically isn’t correctly representing the actual theory; that’s why I called it meme), but to realize how confidence may come across to other people familiar with it.

Could I have gotten this across in a better way? For sure.

I apologize for my tasteless attempt to make this point.

Thanks, it’s all good. 👍 DMs with you were some of the memorable ones I mentioned.

I know that making specific predictions is fraught, but we can say some things for sure. Is the future of programming moldable? Yeah! Accessible? Yeah! More like gaming? Yeah! Etc. This community would be lesser if people didn't notice those big, attractive shapes on the horizon, row out for weeks or years to get a better look, and come back here to compare maps. I love the conversations that feel like ~that.~

Me too! And I’d like to think that these statements are less about shapes of things to chase for and more about values people here already have and share. No future predictions needed.

You value moldable programming environments? Me too. You believe accessibility is important? Me too. You think games are getting some things right? Me too. We already share those beliefs. Here. Today.

Not everything has to be looked at as ~results~ we want to achieve. Sometimes it’s good to share values and explore from there. Enjoying the ~process~ . Together.

There is a project where I know very precisely what I want to build [though it's a good bet that'll shift as I actually work on it...] but very uncertain if >1 are gonna adopt it 🤷‍♂️

I'm pretty certain there are dozens of people who'll find it interesting & provocative :-). I've reached the point where "I have to build this because noone else will".

@Beni Cherniavsky-Paskin That's my situation as well. Which is why having fun along the way is an important implementation criterion for me. A bit like a "no regrets" insurance.

Just finished re-reading John Maeda’s ~The Laws of Simplicity~ . This is the last page in the book. Thought it fit well here, in particular the part about insecurity.

I am pretty good at knowing what I know but pretty terrible at knowing what I don't know and pretty average at evaluating the value of things outside my experience

I’m drawn to this model of content creation, curation, and signal boosting. I don’t find them often though