TeledyN: Boning the Monoliths:
Somewhere along the way, among other things lost in the translation from Good Idea to Market Share, we lost our way in the exceedingly great idea of Unix as a flexible collection of small tools.
Looks like I woke a giant . . . .
Gary lays waste to the current computing landscape and it’s plethora of redundant libraries, excessive dependencies, features a/k/a chrome at the expense of lightweight utility.
His conclusion takes me back to the halcyon days of 1994/5 when Java was new and cool (and didn’t do anything you couldn’t do with an animated gif). The Promise in those days was small, lightweight apps or even components that were available on demand. Need a spreadsheet? One click downloads one to your desktop, opens your file, and you just use it. The issue at the time was micropayments: how would you pay for this kind of thing? Metered usage, like your dialup charges? Not really valid in the broadband era. A subscription? That means paying today for a hamburger you may never eat.
Of course, given the improvements we see in stuff like AbiWord, the KOffice suite, OpenOffice, we could see these things being made available for free, with some kind of service value-add for a business model/revenue stream for people who care about such things.
The fly in the ointment? The operating system. Who cares about an operating system? Why should anyone but a programmer care about an operating system? Why hasn’t the very idea of anything below file management and whatever applications you use been abstracted away? And that of course takes us back to another Promise from the 1994/5 era: the notion of doing it all in an application that ran on all platforms, looked consistent, had the same interface and features no matter what was behind it. That was Netscape’s plan, in the course of which they planned to render Windows as nothing more than “a partially debugged set of device drivers.”
So here we are ten years on. Are things better? Are we more free to do what we want with our computers on our internet?