> hey've decided to use tools (ie, Smalltalk) that the rest of the computing industry rejected decades ago
Hey, the Alto wasn't the technological basis for the desktop environment either - it took a different company to popularize the format (Apple's Lisa and the Macintosh). The good thing is that the ideas are spreading - Victor Bret's talks have had a significant impact in developer circles, and more people are taking parts of them in their own project, or at least recognize them and understand their value.
If this means that, this time around, adopting the methods will take a distributed approach of many people including piecemeal parts of the global idea in their pet projects - rather than everything coming together from a single entity, so be it. The times are a-changin'.
> Start by throwing away superstition about how computing is currently done and lets look at other ways we could do it, rooted in well-understood theory. It's a shame that this kind of development is rare and most of the industry is bandwagon-hopping.
Agree. I believe it's largely a matter of inertia, of which computing industry is a major culprit. Back in my time we learned to build the control flow of applications for the command line using a top-down main menu, that stalled waiting for user input, and then called the subroutine for the selected command when the user choose its action number; that was simply how applications were made, we simply didn't know there was a different way. Yet nowadays everyone knows how to use an active event-loop that mixes user- and application-initiated actions.
But at the end, all that inertia is overcome when knowledge about the best processes spreads. The form fields and radio options in HTML appear in essentially the same shape of banking applications in the 60s, which were the result of user-centered research and thus are well suited for the problem they solve. But we now use declarative languages for building the forms and have specific widgets for accessing their values, instead of relying on ad-hoc low-level code for showing the fields and reading their input.
So there's hope that in the long term the best ideas spread, and ultimately they become unattached from the legacy practices where they were first seen.
Hey, the Alto wasn't the technological basis for the desktop environment either - it took a different company to popularize the format (Apple's Lisa and the Macintosh). The good thing is that the ideas are spreading - Victor Bret's talks have had a significant impact in developer circles, and more people are taking parts of them in their own project, or at least recognize them and understand their value.
If this means that, this time around, adopting the methods will take a distributed approach of many people including piecemeal parts of the global idea in their pet projects - rather than everything coming together from a single entity, so be it. The times are a-changin'.
> Start by throwing away superstition about how computing is currently done and lets look at other ways we could do it, rooted in well-understood theory. It's a shame that this kind of development is rare and most of the industry is bandwagon-hopping.
Agree. I believe it's largely a matter of inertia, of which computing industry is a major culprit. Back in my time we learned to build the control flow of applications for the command line using a top-down main menu, that stalled waiting for user input, and then called the subroutine for the selected command when the user choose its action number; that was simply how applications were made, we simply didn't know there was a different way. Yet nowadays everyone knows how to use an active event-loop that mixes user- and application-initiated actions.
But at the end, all that inertia is overcome when knowledge about the best processes spreads. The form fields and radio options in HTML appear in essentially the same shape of banking applications in the 60s, which were the result of user-centered research and thus are well suited for the problem they solve. But we now use declarative languages for building the forms and have specific widgets for accessing their values, instead of relying on ad-hoc low-level code for showing the fields and reading their input.
So there's hope that in the long term the best ideas spread, and ultimately they become unattached from the legacy practices where they were first seen.