On Tue, 11 Feb 2020 at 05:00, Rob Pike wrote: > My general mood about the current standard way of nerd working is how > unimaginative and old-fashioned it feels. There are countless ways we could > be interacting with our terminals, editors, and shells while we program, > but for various sociological and historical reasons we're pretty much using > one from decades ago. I'm sure it's productive for almost everyone, but it > seems dull to me. We could be doing something much more dynamic. I mean, > xterm is hardly more sophisticated than the lame terminal code that ran in > mpx (ca. 1982), other than colors and cursor addressing, which date from > the 1960s via early PCs. IDEs don't sing to me, although they are powerful, > because they don't integrate well with the environment, only with the > language. And they are just lots of features, not a coherent vision. No > model to speak of. > > Compare what happened with our shell windows with what happened with our > "smart" phones in the last 20 years and you'll get some inkling of what I > think we're missing. It's not that we should program the way we use > iPhones, but that there are fields where user interface work has made a > real different recently. Not so in programming, though. We're missing out. > > But I'm a grumpy old man and getting far off topic. Warren should cry, > "enough!". > I recently saw indication that the UI for Sam and Acme were inspired by Oberon. (And per url [1] below, Rob Pike is quoted, sort of...) I'd be interested (and I think that's a TUHS thing ;-) ) in hearing some elaboration on that. All that is said is that "Rob was blown away" and that this "influenced" Sam/Acme; is there some further explanation of that worth pointing at? (Or are some Oberon fans putting words in mouths? ;-) ) [1] https://lists.inf.ethz.ch/pipermail/oberon/2011/006245.html -- When confronted by a difficult problem, solve it by reducing it to the question, "How would the Lone Ranger handle this?"