If we wish to close the gap between user experience and programmer experience, enabling and encouraging regular users to control their own environments and experiences, we must do three things:
First, we must eliminate barriers and discontinuities in maturation of the programmer and the development of applications. Common barriers today include security, concurrency, real-time, distribution, persistence, extension, dependency management, composition and mashups, and weak commitment (support for undo, abort). These barriers too often force programmers to scrap a lot of what they have learned and developed. Casual programmers cannot afford to bypass these barriers, and so stall in their development. Second, we must make the user experience programmable by casual users. Ideally, we can express the UI itself as a program - i.e. widgets = syntax, live programming, with the deep composition and extension properties we might expect of a programming language. Make it easy to peek under the hood and see how any tool or page or menu is implemented. Support extension, mashup and reconstitution of everything the user experiences. No black boxes. We can have rigid structure, but only if it's modular and replaceable. Third, we must get the experience to the users. I.e. we need "killer applications" to motivate using these tools - something people would want to use anyway. People don't miss freedoms they haven't experienced. Regards, Dave On Sat, Jul 14, 2012 at 12:36 PM, Ivan Zhao <[email protected]> wrote: > 45 years after Engelbart's demo, we have a read-only web and Microsoft > Word 2011, a gulf between "users" and "programmers" that can't be wider, > and the scariest part is that most people have been indoctrinated long > enough to realize there could be alternatives. > > Naturally, this is just history repeating itself (a la pre-Gutenberg > scribes, Victorian plumbers). But my question is, what can we learn from > these historical precedences, in order to to consciously to design our > escape path. A revolution? An evolution? An education? > > Ivan > _______________________________________________ > fonc mailing list > [email protected] > http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc > > -- bringing s-words to a pen fight
_______________________________________________ fonc mailing list [email protected] http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc
