On Apr 4, 2021, at 3:25 PM, David Arnold <davida@pobox.com> wrote:

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.

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.