Yes, this was way better than punch-cards. But it was incremental and used completely arbitrary technology simply because it was available from somewhere else.
UI as a concept was poisoned by Windows and its shitty derivatives.
Like, there is no real reason you can't compose stuff when using GUIs. In fact, it should be easier than pipelining commands.
There is no real reason the keyboard should be crippled by working in a GUI. It should be easier to learn commands. (But have you noticed that we still don't have dedicated keys for cut, copy, pate, undo and redo? The most common operations present in almost all applications. But we have a Windows key and caps lock.)
Despite what people think, UI is still mostly unexplored territory with tons of potential for improvement.
BTW, my favorite code editor isn't an IDE. It's LINQPad, because it gives me immediate feedback without much noise. Going from it back to REPLs feels like a downgrade.
You're right, I should have said "still don't have on PC". I believe Xerox Star also had all those keys and then some.
This might not seem like a big deal for some. But there are two important points to consider:
1. A lot of inexperienced user still go to mouse menu for copy-paste. This is horrible, but kind of natural, since a lot of UIs don't teach shortcuts.
2. Cut/Copy/Paste/Undo/Redo should be treated as fundamental building blocks of user interaction, not some "shortcut" that happens to do a thing. They aren't even UI-specific. You can do all of them in a command line app (although the semantics would much poorer).
When I saw the demo of Xerox Star on YouTube I was both enlightened and depressed by the current state of things. Most people have no idea that icons were supposed to be objects and that interacting with them was supposed to be a way to send and direct messages to and between them.
Visit the Emacs land. Embrace the joke that it's an operating system (truth be told, it's not really a joke). What you'll see is something combining the best features of CLI, TUI and GUI. A 2D canvas with various UI primitives, made of text. There's no separation - like in traditional GUIs - between what's accessible to user and programmer (the contents of editable fields) vs. what's just dumb pixels (everything else). If it's displayed, it can be used as an anchor for navigation. It can be copied or interacted with, either manually or by code. The depth of interoperability this enables is unseen in the GUI world.
I wish GUIs would learn from that, but I don't think there's any GUI framework attempting this, besides maybe CLIM (Common Lisp Interface Manager, see[0], and that's not because of being inspired by Emacs, but because of shared historical roots of Lisp philosophy.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AIWZ_pbLYqQ
Yes, this was way better than punch-cards. But it was incremental and used completely arbitrary technology simply because it was available from somewhere else.
UI as a concept was poisoned by Windows and its shitty derivatives.
Like, there is no real reason you can't compose stuff when using GUIs. In fact, it should be easier than pipelining commands.
There is no real reason the keyboard should be crippled by working in a GUI. It should be easier to learn commands. (But have you noticed that we still don't have dedicated keys for cut, copy, pate, undo and redo? The most common operations present in almost all applications. But we have a Windows key and caps lock.)
Despite what people think, UI is still mostly unexplored territory with tons of potential for improvement.
BTW, my favorite code editor isn't an IDE. It's LINQPad, because it gives me immediate feedback without much noise. Going from it back to REPLs feels like a downgrade.