He mentions vi/emacs debate, but perhaps more relevant is all the Linux Desktop and KDE/Gnome drama. Tablets and touchscreen interfaces blow the entire desktop paradigm to smithereens. The desktop UI is done, folks. The Linux community needs to wake up. All that drama, all the work on creating competing UI widget codebases, window managers, etc, and it's ALL going to get thrown out with the bathwater.
Could you please explain the sentiment about the desktop paradigm becoming outmoded? People seem to say this so frequently and I can't understand it at all. What about people who write code, for example? Do you expect them to be able to achieve the same standard of productivity as they currently can on <insert favorite platform here>?
Don't worry; ten years from now some people will still shout how wonderful is yet another Apple's ultimate hardware build from "miraculously excavated" Jobs' notes -- for instance an eye-track-controlled sphere covered with continuous display showing only "Give 10$ to Apple" button. While others will fork dwm to overcome recent "overly revolutional" changes which catastrophically degraded their productivity.
what? how is that the question? the argument is that the desktop paradigm is on its way out, not that the keyboard is. the goal is to have a consistent UI that can be used equally well from a touchscreen or a mouse/keyboard interface. nobody is suggesting killing the keyboard, that's retarded.
People who write code are a tiny, tiny, tiny fraction of the overall computer-using population. That fraction will only get smaller in the years to come as mobile devices get cheaper and more capable.
Traditional desktop interfaces will survive, but they will survive in the same way that, say, Emacs survives -- as a niche product for that tiny market segment, not as the default way the Teeming Millions interact with their personal tech.
Let everybody interact in the way they want. That is freedom of choice. And the secret lies in the interfaces and protocols. I can read email in many different ways. That is the freedom the protocol gives me. It is open, well documented and wide spread.
We should strive to support open protocols instead of closed APIs which are controlled by single companies.
Then everybody can use whatever User Interface they prefer and everbody can come up with new User Interfaces any time.
The AIM/ICQ/MSN vs. XMPP world illustrates this principle. Even if someone supports the closed protocols with a multi protocol client, the support eventually gets deliberately broken by the controlling party.
Protocols are way more important than the currently popular implementation of it.
> People who write code are a tiny, tiny, tiny fraction of the overall computer-using population. That fraction will only get smaller in the years to come as mobile devices get cheaper and more capable.
Hm, but only as long as the saturation of "computers" is increasing rapidly. If you were to focus on a developed country with good smart phone penetration, I think it's possible that the percentage of coders is increasing as old people die and young people take to new technology more readily. I guess maybe it depends on where you draw the line between power user/script kiddie/programmer.
That fraction will only get smaller in the years to come as mobile devices get cheaper and more capable.
I doubt this statement. The number of people that write code is bound to increase in the future, not become smaller. And that has (among other things) to do with mobile devices getting cheaper and more capable. And generally with further increase of automation / software complexity. And with more people that want to be producers instead of consumers in the computer age...
I'm talking about percentages. It's not that the population of programmers won't grow; it's that the population of non-programming users will grow more.
Fifteen years ago it was the web browser that was going to blow the desktop OS to smithereens. Larry Ellison announced the "network computer" that had no local storage (i.e., no hard drive) booted from the net and revolved around the browser. Although the web browser has become more important over the last 15 years, the only thing we have today that resembles a network computer is the Google Chromebook, and the only people who have those things are people who got them below cost and want to replace the (Chrome) OS with a desktop OS and (returning to the theme of the OP) people who really really really love the web.
There has been over 30 years of research and field experience with the WIMP paradigm. The code bases (source trees) for the three most "popular" (most relied-on) desktop OSes are over 20 years old. (Yes, I know that the code base for Windows XP and later differs from that of Windows 98 and earlier, but the code base for XP and later, namely, the NT code base, is itself over 20 years old if you count the final 18 months or so of its pre-release development.) I concede that there is a good chance that iOS and Android and Windows Metro will eventually kill the desktop OS, but that is going to take another 10 years and probably significantly longer.
The web already has replaced Windows desktop software for most peoples uses of a computer. Facebook, news, email, photo sharing (flikr), music (di.fm), video (youtube)... That's all most people need from a computer and tablets, with an optional keyboard accomplish this just fine.
There is no inherent reason that people need to use a virtual desktop, remote controlled by a mouse. The desktop metaphors, overlapping windows, cascading menus, constant nagging popups, files and folders, hardware drivers, blue screens... all this stuff is a nightmare for average users. They are already abandoning the desktop model because it never worked very well.
