5 Apr
2021
5 Apr
'21
7:34 a.m.
On Apr 4, 2021, at 4:33 PM, Clem Cole <clemc(a)ccc.com> wrote:
On Sun, Apr 4, 2021 at 7:01 PM Bakul Shah <bakul(a)iitbombay.org
<mailto:bakul@iitbombay.org>> wrote:
Many things are easier to convey visually. It would be neat if unix paradigms can be
extended to visual design as well. And you certainly can't do visual design easily in
vi/emacs. Just like in Autocad you need both interactivity and programmability for
creating visual elements.
On Apr 4, 2021, at 3:25 PM, David Arnold
<davida(a)pobox.com <mailto:davida@pobox.com>> wrote:
Except Unix is kind of hard to see. It wasn't just the hierarchical file system but
the idea of composability. Even now we whip up a shell "one-liners" to perform
some task we just thought of. All that is lost. And not just on mobile devices. For
example search through email messages for something in an email "app". And no UI
composability. We have to use extremely heavyweight IDEs such as X-Code weighing at 15GB
(even "du -s /Application/X-code" takes tens of seconds!) to painstakingly
construct a UI. We can't just whip up a dashboard to measure & display some
realtime changing process/entity. There may be equally heavyweight third party tools but
there has been no Bell Labs like research crew to distill it down to the essence of
composable UI and ship it with every copy. The idea that users too can learn to
"program" if given the right tools.
Exactly my point. The only difference I suspect is I just don't bother with the IDE
(Xcode or VS). Frankly, vi/emacs, or as we discussed a few days ago, ed is still way
more preferable when I'm programming. For us UNIX historians, we need to be careful
and learn from our own history here -- the Cell Phone/Mobile target is the engine for the
next Christenian style disruption. It is by far the #1 target for people writing new
programs (which I find a little sad personally - but I understand and accept -- time has
marched on). In the end, a small mobile target will be the tech on top, and available
will be driven by market behavior and those suppliers will be "who has the gold.”
I feel I should point out that both the dominant mobile operating systems are Unix-hased.
The UI is necessarily new, but astonishingly the 50 year old basic abstractions are the
same. I mentioned in another email Intel's new
development suite - OneAPI. Absolutely speaking for myself here, I am a bit at odds with
management WRT to much of it, as I feel the direction is a bit miss guided. But I do
understand why Intel is doing it/trying. Everyone in the industry seems to be saying
"use my Framework, my language, my solution and I will solve your problem."
"You will sell more copies of the program if you use my portal, etc." Intel to
compete, needs to do the same things. To me, it seems a bit like fairy dust - a
promise that will work for a set of people, and of course, some firms like my own employer
will keep making money (or in the words of the Dr. Sueuss Lorax character: "Biggering
and Biggering." As I said in the previous message, it is driven by the other golden
rule.
IMHO a bigger need is some discipline on storage. As things stand, it is hard to extract
data from applications for legitimate uses but not so hard to extract for illegitimate
uses. If app A for some specific domain dies, there is no guarantee that app B for the
same domain can use A's data.
What I always felt made UNIX powerful was that it did
not seem like the BTL folks were trying to sell anything. They were trying to solve real
problems they and the folks at AT&T had when it came to realistically building and
deploying systems. Yes, there were hidden from the profit motive at the time because of
the unique rules of the 1956 consent degree and we all were winners because of it because
they say -- sure here you can use it too.
Similar conditions existed and exist to a certain extent in research orgs of some
companies but I think that is a necessary condition, not sufficient. The right research
crew can bring in another kind of interactivity -- in creativity, in trying out and
critiquing each others' ideas and building on them. And you still need the right key
people.
Now that we are back to a winner take all market,
(OSVM/360 vs. VMS vs. winders ...) I think we have traded away designing for the sake of
getting the job done properly, for designing to sell as many as possible (i.e. be sexy and
capture a market, not be simple and do the job well).