there's this quote I like,
by Jef Raskin -
all interfaces are wrong,
and some are good.
I cherished a few videogames in my childhood,
i play the cello - it hurts my back.
but the only interface i need is a text-editor.
when I go to space, I will leave all the applications behind.
typing may be the most cathartic and enjoyable activity,
that we've ever created
fast typing is a near-second to sex -
you watch people typing, and they're in bliss
- everything else is combat
let me say -
the typewriter
came decades before the computer did
and computers just stole it.
which is obvious now
but it wasn't clear that typewriters had anything to do with computers
the light-pen - a full year before the mother of all demos.
you could have been a young engineer working on the ENIAC,
and typed your first english sentence into a computer,
as a senior citizen.
not a typewriter
computer-backpacks, headsets, gestural inputs,
computer-watches,
and voice interfaces -
these are actually way more obvious things.
the knee-mouse, 1965
December 9, 1968:
Engelbart typed his shopping list-
and the words were little playful chiclets
like a spreadsheet of letters?
and not computer commands-
the input was not parsed
the computer just ignored it.
the computer had no idea what he was typing.
that is the big idea.
this occurred to me only very recently.
typewriters
did not have
... a point.
typing a document,
instead of hand-writing it,
was just fancy.
it was prestige.
it made things seem more formal.
and that's all.
this humungous demographic
was very capable and bored -
and they didn't mind typing.
and honestly, I don't either.
typing is a nice activity,
it's a bit like playing a mild videogame,
or doing an easy crossword puzzle.
it's actually great.
the answering machine
never became a formal, prestiguous thing.
and everyone still hates talking to their computers.
people are very funny.
typing won - who would have bet on that?
we're weird.
The personal computer became the typewriter,
and not the walkie-talkie,
the pen,
the radio,
or the shotgun.
most linguists now agree that the alphabet was created only once -
and all human languages use the same derived one.
it makes me feel insane, how people in China use the ASCII keyboard.
you've gotta admit,
as an english-speaker,
there are truman show vibes.
how engineers, playwrights, criminal-judges use the same keyboard
- use the same punctuation -
I think all the time about Osama Bin Laden on his computer.
we all should
there's this vsauce video where he calculates
how many people are pressing the spacebar
at the same time, around the world.
writers often link computers to the hippies and LSD,
which is maybe aiming a little low,
because I think it's even more cosmic than that.
Some say that the alphabet is a requirement for religion.
- religion is always in text.
spoken words are too loose. they can't do it.
people need their ideas stamped in.
there is a lesson to learn from keyboards
we should look at typing and go hmmm..
very few activities that have captured us all -
and pushed us in such a curious direction.
typing is weird.
the craziest thing, is that
computers don't understand text.
we all seem to believe that they sometime will.
right now, we put our thoughts into text
and we can't get them back out -
like, the thoughts are gone.
we can scan letters, in a brittle, stupid way
we're creating text today like we're record-keeping
for future historians -
that fancy scholars will hoover-up your tweets,
and say thank you.
but that doesn't seem like it's happening, actually.
making text useful is a great problem of our time,
and nobody is really working on it.
there's a name for it,
it's called markup
and until there is a flawless computer-understander,
the world desperately needs more markup.
and fewer interfaces.
could there ever be
a good
markup language?maybe not.
two sentences on wikipedia
an SQL injection, on a bumper-sticker
RUNOFF - a markup language from 60 years ago.
• − • −
a formatting characater in morse code
called a prosign.
arcane
CLI
patronizing
GUI
add commands
create a markup
"wysiwyg"
build a UI
information has been fumbling-around in this loop
way before computers were a thing.
it has been careers and careers -
and we are still stuck.
it's frustrating, and I can't figure out what the problem is, exactly.
do we need
a new punctuation character?
a new text editor?
a new web standard?
is Google going to announce something one year?
i really don't know.
I'll admit that my understanding comes
from the movie amadeus -
but in classical music,
the actual note-taking
seems to be the reason why so few people
- only savants -
composed classical music.
You have to keep the whole thing in your head,
while deciding the placement of every note.
it's impossible.
A symphony was a huge accomplishment,
arguably the most technical accomplishment, at one time.
composers were paid upfront -
and it would take them several years.
there were vaporware symphonies
a sympony is 100s of pages of notation
- effectively computer code,
which the composer has never heard.
when you hear bad classical music, this is why.
classical music is a
tooling limited
notation-battle.
notation-battle.
It's infuriating how dreadful music notation is,
and how easily-played an instrument is.
Some musicians give up on planning notes all together, because of the UX.
people can't concentrate in this obscene way.
almost every field is the same -
screenwriter Dustin Lance Black's excruciating workflow
you can make something only if you can fit it all in your head, first.
Putting data in -
that's a battle, everywhere.
Notation is a problem.
a short story by edgar allen poe, with no newlines.
text-editors are simple until you try to make one.
I went to grad-school, and I still don't understand Ralph Levien's blog posts.
it's amazing how nobody knows how best to make a text-editor.
apparently you should use a splay tree?
or a 'relaxed radix balanced tree' ?
every comment on hackernews says something different.
we all know we want it,
and we're furious when it's wrong or slow.
CRDT demo by Jared Forsyth
variable width means non-vertical cursor jumping:
and the greatest challenge today seems to be supporting
the questionable design decisions made by the Unicode Consortium -
👨+ 👩 = 👨👩👦
a group of people introducing bugs into literally every computer program -
hidden characters, that display nothing,
and which break nearly all text analysis today -
ideas that force all computer users to understand
30-page PDFs, on some site.
how did we break plaintext?
it was literally working better, in 1968.
for me, few things actually produce such a fury,
or deep sigh -
or lead me to feel human beings
trend-downwards
towards failure.
I understand why people get so down about oil spills
how they are just going to keep happening.
that's our current plan.
we're actually pretty screwed up.
things are pretty bad.
word-processing may be too hard to do.
and this is terrible.
this is not just whining about some product feature,
we are the information-technology species.
that's our whole thing.
and typing is how -
computer-interpretable typing is something we desperately want,
and just cannot figure out
we should consider this to be
among the most serious problems.