I adore the banner idea here. The various trends are interesting, but I still don't see anything that really sings deeply to me. They all have hints of the real, of a coming harmony & bridging of the gulf between development & user, but they fall short too.
End-user programming comes close, but I don't think it's the real notion. It makes primary the programmability, which is, imo, an unncessary ego-centrism. Software simply making what it does visible, making it observable, and inviting in the potential for interaction, for manipulation, change, alteration: that, to me, is where we must go. I'm delighted and quite surprised to see this comment having risen mightily in the rankings, to the #2 spot, but permit me to cite the #1 comment in reflection here:
> "We’ve known for a long time that software will eat the world — the comings and going’s of everyday life, once they are expressed as code, become infinitely easier to patch and improve using only a keyboard and display."
To me, it's less about home-cooked & home-grown & indie, and more about software that has a basic fair shake. Software is either societal in nature: it participates in, shapes/can be shaped, discusses itself, engages in the democratic processes of the world. Or it is a closed, dark entity. I see little ways to regard most software as anything other than alien and hostile, as invasive & anti-communicative: a blackbox, with us trapped inside.
The way through though is incremental. Finding new ways to let the software we have expose itself, to make itself visible & explicit & introspectable & orchestrateable & controllable & malleable. I believe software high & low will better serve the world, be better able to do it's job, when there is a general systems fabric & when it can keep us in the loop.
> > "We’ve known for a long time that software will eat the world — the comings and going’s of everyday life, once they are expressed as code, become infinitely easier to patch and improve using only a keyboard and display."
Yeah, I kinda see this as the exact opposite. The fact that symbolic code, keyboards, and displays are all tied together is no accident. It's a limitation that prevents computation / simulation from being used in situations that aren't oriented around text-input.
There's so many situations like this! We're a bit blind to it, because we're used to pulling out our phone, and it's hard to predict what we'd all use computers for if we escaped the trappings of mouse-keyboard-text-code. It's just like how cheap paper / the push for literacy helped make paper receipts at coffee shops a thing, but nobody could have predicted cheap-paper-receipts in the 1600's when books were so insanely laborious to create (forget even read!).
End-user programming comes close, but I don't think it's the real notion. It makes primary the programmability, which is, imo, an unncessary ego-centrism. Software simply making what it does visible, making it observable, and inviting in the potential for interaction, for manipulation, change, alteration: that, to me, is where we must go. I'm delighted and quite surprised to see this comment having risen mightily in the rankings, to the #2 spot, but permit me to cite the #1 comment in reflection here:
> "We’ve known for a long time that software will eat the world — the comings and going’s of everyday life, once they are expressed as code, become infinitely easier to patch and improve using only a keyboard and display."
To me, it's less about home-cooked & home-grown & indie, and more about software that has a basic fair shake. Software is either societal in nature: it participates in, shapes/can be shaped, discusses itself, engages in the democratic processes of the world. Or it is a closed, dark entity. I see little ways to regard most software as anything other than alien and hostile, as invasive & anti-communicative: a blackbox, with us trapped inside.
The way through though is incremental. Finding new ways to let the software we have expose itself, to make itself visible & explicit & introspectable & orchestrateable & controllable & malleable. I believe software high & low will better serve the world, be better able to do it's job, when there is a general systems fabric & when it can keep us in the loop.