SCN: Food for thought...

[Steve]

x-no-archive: yes  

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Excerpts from: The Second Coming - A Manifesto, by David 
Gelertner  

Computing will be transformed. It's not just that our problems are 
big, they are big and obvious. It's not just that the solutions are 
simple, they are simple and right under our noses.  

It's not just that hardware is more advanced than software; the last 
big operating-systems breakthrough was the Macintosh, sixteen 
years ago, and today's hottest item is Linux, which is a version of 
Unix, which was new in 1976. Users react to the hard truth that 
commerical software applications tend to be badly-designed, badly-
made, incomprehensible and obsolete by blaming themselves:  
"Computers for Morons,"  "Operating Systems for Livestock."  

Because we don't believe in technological change (we only say we 
do), we accept bad computer products with a shrug; we work around 
them, make the best of them and barely even notice their defects -  
instead of demanding that they be fixed and changed.   

We know that big developments are inevitable in the software world -
if only because nothing in that world corresponds to a "book." You 
can see a book whole from the outside. You know in advance how a 
book is laid out - where the contents or the index will be - and how to 
"operate" one. As you work through it, you always know where you 
stand: how far you have gone and how much is left. "Book" can be a 
physical object or a text - an abstraction with many interchangeable 
physical embodiments. These properties don't hold for file systems 
or web sites. You can't see or judge one from the outside, anticipate 
the lay-out, tell where you stand as you work your way through.  

When you deal with a remote web site, you largely bypass the 
power of your desktop in favor of the far-off power of a web server. 
Using your powerful desktop computer as a mere channel to reach 
web sites, reaching through and beyond it instead of using it, is like 
renting a Hyundai and keeing your Porsche in the garage. Like 
executing programs out of disk storage instead of main memory and 
cache. The Web makes the desktop impotent.   

The windows-menus-mouse "desktop" interface was a brilliant 
invention and is now obsolete. It wastes screen space on 
meaningless images, fails to provide adequate clues to what is 
inside the files represented by those blurry little images, forces 
users to choose icons for the desktop when the system could 
choose them better itself, and keeps users jockeying windows in a 
losing battle for an unimpeded view of the workspace.   

Icons and "collapsed views" seem new, but we have met them 
before. Any book has a "collapsed" or "iconified" view, namely its 
spine. An icon conveys far less information that the average book 
spine - and is much smaller. Might a horizontal stack of "book 
spines" onscreen be more useful than a clutter of icons?  

Computers are fundamentally unlike file cabinets because they can 
take action. Metaphors have a profound effect on computing: the file-
cabinet metaphor traps us in a passive instead of active view of 
information management that is fundamentally wrong for computers. 

The rigid file and directory system you are stuck with on your Mac or 
PC was designed by programmers for programmers - and is still a 
good system for programmers. It is no good for non-programmers. It 
never was, and was never intended to be.  

If you have three pet dogs, give them names. If you have 10,000 
head of cattle, don't bother. Nowadays, the idea of giving a name to 
every file on your computer is ridiculous.   

Our standard policy on file names has far-reaching consequences: it 
doesn't merely force us to make up names where no name is called 
for; it also imposes strong limits on our handling of an important 
class of documents - ones that arrive from the outside world. A 
newly-arrived email message, for example, can't stand on its own 
as a separate document - can't show up alongside other files in 
searches, sit by itself on the desktop, be opened or printed 
independently; it has no name, so it must be buried on arrival inside 
some existing file that does have a name.  

You shouldn't have to put files in directories. The directories should 
reach out and take them. If a file belongs in six directories, all six 
should reach out and grab it automatically, simultaneously.   

A file should be allowed to have no name, one name or many 
names. Many files should be allowed to share one name. A file 
should be allowed to be in no directory, one directory, or many 
directories. Many files should be allowed to share one directory. Of 
these eight possibilities, only three are legal and the other five are 
banned - for no good reason.  

A well-designed store or public building allows you to size up the 
whole space from outside, or as soon as you walk in - you see 
immediately how things are laid out and roughly how large and deep 
the space is. Today's typical web site is a failure because it is 
opaque. You ought to be able to see immediately how the site is 
arranged, how big it is, how deep and how broad. It ought to be 
transparent.  

Software can solve hard problems in two ways: by algorithm or by 
making connections - by delivering the problem to exactly the right 
human problem-solver. The second technique is just as powerful as 
the first, but so far we have ignored it.  

If you have plenty of money, the best consequence (so they say) is 
that you no longer need to think about money. In the future we will 
have plenty of technology - and the best consequence will be that 
we will no longer have to think about technology. We will return with  
gratitude and relief to the topics that actually count.
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