Folks, Relax yourselves. I guess my comments were a combination of vague and evocative, and launched reactions in many directions. I just was speaking from personal experience. There is nothing more fulfilling and rewarding than building technology that improves lives, and computer science has a lot to say about that -- but the wisdom is usually counter-intuitive. Most people struggle with great design because the difference between a great design and a good design is often remarkably subtle, and often the approaches are polar opposites. I remember a quote in Alan Kay's *Early History of Smalltalk* that has stuck with me for a long time:
One of the interested features of NLS was that its user interface was a > parametric and could be supplied by the end user in the form of a "grammar > of interaction given in their compiler-compiler TreeMeta. This was similar > to William Newman's early "Reaction Handler" [Newman 66] work in specifying > interfaces by having the end-user or developer construct through tablet and > stylus an iconic regular expression grammar with action procedures at the > states (NLS allowed embeddings via its context free rules). This was > attractive in many ways, particularly William's scheme, but *to me there > was a monstrous bug in this approach.* *Namely, these grammars forced the > user to be in a system state which required getting out of before any new > kind of interaction could be done.* In hierarchical menus or "screens" one > would have to backtrack to a master state in order to go somewhere else. *What > seemed to be required were states in which there was a transition arrow to > every other state--not a fruitful concept in formal grammar theory. In other > words, a much "flatter" interface seemed called for--but could such a thing > be made interesting and rich enough to be useful? * > That's a GREAT question. How do you turn a set of design constraints that is boring in formal grammar theory academic circles and make it so such a model is actually useful? One idea could be that it isn't actually a boring formal grammar theory question. Maybe we're just not phrasing the question the right way? Perhaps we haven't closely looked at the problem domain, and so it only is boring from a superficial distance. On Thu, Jul 8, 2010 at 6:46 PM, Steve Dekorte <[email protected]> wrote: > > It's been said that each generation thinks that it invented sex. > Could the same be said of depression? > > On 2010-07-08, at 08:44 AM, John Zabroski wrote: > > I personally do not believe technology actually improves lives. Usually, > it is the opposite. Technology creates instant gratification and addiction > to it thereof, and the primary reason we are so addicted to technology is > because we have become so empty inside. > > _______________________________________________ > fonc mailing list > [email protected] > http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc >
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