"Only one GUI has ever been seriously tried, and its best ideas date from the 1970s. Surely there are other possibilities. (Linux’s interface isn’t even as good as Windows!)
There has been much talk about component architectures but
only one true success: Unix pipes. It should be possible to
build interactive and distributed applications from piece parts.
The future is distributed computation, but the language
community has done very little to address that possibility."
"The world has decided how it wants computers to be. The
systems software research community influenced that decision
somewhat, but very little, and now it is shut out of the
discussion..."
And particularly relevant to the HN community at large:
"Be courageous. Try different things; experiment. Try to give a cool demo."
http://herpolhode.com/rob/utah2000.pdf
"Only one GUI has ever been seriously tried, and its best ideas date from the 1970s. Surely there are other possibilities. (Linux’s interface isn’t even as good as Windows!) There has been much talk about component architectures but only one true success: Unix pipes. It should be possible to build interactive and distributed applications from piece parts. The future is distributed computation, but the language community has done very little to address that possibility."
"The world has decided how it wants computers to be. The systems software research community influenced that decision somewhat, but very little, and now it is shut out of the discussion..."
And particularly relevant to the HN community at large: "Be courageous. Try different things; experiment. Try to give a cool demo."