Thanks for the serious response to a somewhat snarky comment.
I see software development as only one among the many things a computing system should enable. It's definitely an important one. But computers should enable creativity and power for all kinds of tasks, not just programming.
It's sad to me that people in all these different fields besides ours get stuck with webapps. I understand why they use them, they're very convenient. But it would have been great if we could have provided them an even better OS/desktop environment so that they never would have had to switch to such an unempowering tool.
Additionally, programmers being one of the last holdouts of actually engaging with Unix-as-a-way-of-doing-things is a precarious place to be. Microsoft/GitHub is on full "embrace" mode again, and it looks like they're going to make another run at slurping everyone into their ecosystem. Same with tools like Repl.it. It seems to me that the proportion of people who are engaged with the Unix way of doing things (piping text around, etc.) is shrinking, not growing.
EDIT: To get myself back on topic, for these reasons I see people experimenting with new (and crucially local) environments as really exciting. Traditional Unix environments don't need to be the last word, we can do better.
Apple went down a very interesting path during the interregnum years from 1985 through 1996. It was a beacon of creativity where some of its engineers worked on projects that offered new visions of personal computing that empowered the user without requiring them to be full-fledged programmers. HyperCard and AppleScript are examples of such projects, and the Knowledge Navigator, while not an actual product, was one of Apple's visions. I also find OpenDoc to be quite intriguing; OpenDoc would have introduced component-based GUI software to the mass public. Users could perform tasks by mixing-and-matching components and applying them to a document.
It would have been really cool to have seen Copland and Gershwin in its completed forms, but sadly as creative Apple was in the 1990s, its management was a mess until Steve Jobs returned, and so Copland never saw the light of day other than a few developer releases.
I am grateful for the work that Steve Jobs did at NeXT and for his amazing work returning to Apple, saving it from possible bankruptcy, and making it the juggernaut that it is today. I've long been a fan of Mac OS X. However, parts of me miss the Apple of the 1980s and 1990s, where the engineers and researchers there explored ideas of how to make personal computing better. I feel that the personal computing experience for desktops have been stuck in a rut for nearly 20 years, with some aspects actually degrading rather than improving.
But projects such as Snakeware give me hope that we'll see desktop computing move forward. I'm actually working on a side project where I'm creating a Common Lisp-based desktop environment inspired by Lisp machines and OpenDoc that can run on Linux and the BSDs, but I'm in the design phase and I'm far from writing any code (I've been studying up on graphics programming since part of this project involves writing a new GUI toolkit). There is still a lot of room for innovation on the desktop, and as you said, Unix isn't the last word, even for programming.
> However, parts of me miss the Apple of the 1980s and 1990s, where the engineers and researchers there explored ideas of how to make personal computing better. I feel that the personal computing experience for desktops have been stuck in a rut for nearly 20 years, with some aspects actually degrading rather than improving.
I totally agree with this, and think it's an incredibly important issue.
If you post anything public about your Lisp-based DE please feel free to let me know (email in profile).
Unfortunately Unix blew a 28-3 lead against Netscape Navigator and now 99% of people spend their time in web browsers instead.
I think this speaks to the weakness of the experience using Unix, not its strength.