5 Apr
2021
5 Apr
'21
5 a.m.
On Apr 4, 2021, at 3:25 PM, David Arnold
<davida(a)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.
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.