Englebart's Violin (2012)
Thanks for posting this &#x27;DanBC, this is golden! It captures exactly the issues I sometimes rant about in UI&#x2F;UX threads on HN - that the IT industry is focused on producing toys, not tools.<p>The article focuses on hardware, but its point is more general, it touches software too - basically the solutions developed both &quot;by developers for developers&quot; and those created for non-tech users. There are lots of things that worry&#x2F;sadden me about this.<p>Within the industry, I&#x27;m tired of hearing comments like &quot;don&#x27;t use advanced feature X, it&#x27;s hard for the junior programmers&quot;. Like, &quot;don&#x27;t use lambdas &#x2F; streams in Java 8; it may be more readable for you, but it isn&#x27;t for the cow-orkers who don&#x27;t know lambdas&quot;. Well, one would think that it is expected of a professional to occasionally <i>learn some stuff</i>. But what I see instead is &quot;best practices&quot; aimed at the lowest common denominator creating a culture of code monkeys.<p>As for end-user software, I&#x27;m tired of ranting about it, and - as I learned from this post - Erik Naggum (like usual) does a much better way of explaining the problem. So I&#x27;ll just end with a graph.<p><pre><code>  power                                                                    &#x2F;--
    ^                                                                 &#x2F;----   professional
    |                                                             &#x2F;---          software
    |                                                          ---
    |                                                         &#x2F;
    |                                                        &#x2F;
    |                                                       &#x2F;
    |                                                      &#x2F;
    |                                                     &#x2F;
    |                                                    &#x2F;
    |                                                   &#x2F;
    |                                                  &#x2F;
    |                                                 &#x2F;
    |                                               &#x2F;&#x2F;
    |                                             &#x2F;-
    |                                           &#x2F;-
    |                                        &#x2F;--
    |                                      &#x2F;-                             &quot;user-friendly&quot;
    |                                    &#x2F;-                                  software
    |                                  &#x2F;-                         &#x2F;---------------------
    |                       &#x2F;-------------------------------------
    +-----------------------      &#x2F;-
    |                        &#x2F;----
    |                 &#x2F;------
    |         &#x2F;-------
    |  &#x2F;------
    |--
    +--------------+--------------------------------------------------------------------&gt;
                   |                                                                 time
                   |
                   |
         point where companies make their sale
    and beyond which they don&#x27;t give a shit anymore
</code></pre>
We could be doing <i>so much more</i> with the power of computing if only we gave up on the expectations that people have to master of their software tools in 15 seconds since first seeing them...