[REBOL] For Your Entertainment
From: rebol::techscribe::com at: 22-Dec-2000 1:48
Hi folks,
I just checked my email and found a nice interview excerpt on the K
mailing list that I think is apropos and a lot of fun.
<quote>
It is from an interview with Eben Moglin by Jay Worthington, featured in
Immaterial Incoroporated at http://www.immaterial.net/page.php3?id=44
WORTHINGTON: How long would you say Linux has been the best good? Five
years? It seems like there's a whole world of consumers out there who
don't
feel themselves capable of judging whether Linux is a better good at
all.
MOGLEN: There are two possible ways of thinking about this question. One
is, how long does it take the current user base to get to free software,
and the other is how long does it take the current user base to be
replaced
by another user base. It's a transitional issue. In 1979, when I was
working at IBM, I wrote an internal memo lambasting the Apple Lisa,
which
was Apple's first attempt to adapt Xerox PARC technology, the graphical
user interface, into a desktop PC. I was then working on the development
of
APL2, a nested array, algorithmic, symbolic language, and I was
committed
to the idea that what we were doing with computers was making languages
that were better than natural languages for procedural thought. The idea
was to do for whole ranges of human thinking what mathematics has been
doing for thousands of years in the quantitative arrangement of
knowledge,
and to help people think in more precise and clear ways. What I saw in
the
Xerox PARC technology was the caveman interface, you point and you
grunt. A
massive winding down, regressing away from language, in order to address
the technological nervousness of the user. Users wanted to be
infantilized,
to return to a pre-linguistic condition in the using of computers, and
the
Xerox PARC technology's primary advantage was that it allowed users to
address computers in a pre-linguistic way. This was to my mind a
terribly
socially retrograde thing to do, and I have not changed my mind about
that.
I lost that war in the early 1980s, went to law school, got a history
PHD,
did other things, because the fundamental turn in the technology - which
we
see represented in its most technologically degenerate form, which is
Windows, the really crippled version. I mean, I use Xwindows every day
on
my free-software PCs; I have nothing against a windowing environment,
but
it's a windowing environment which is network transparent and which is
based around the fact that inside every window there's some dialogue to
have with some linguistic entity.
WORTHINGTON: There's a command prompt in every window.
MOGLEN: Exactly. And, of course, network transparency, a central idea of
how to organize computers in the world so that what's behind your window
might be a process on another computer is largely gone. The whole thing
represents a very downmarket view of the way people and machines ought
to
interact.
</quote>
Perhaps REBOL is a better way to go than APL/2?
Take Care,
Elan