Dynamicland: The Next Big Thing Is a Room
It&#x27;s nice and all, but this is a nightmare for accessibility. Not everyone can read paper or even move around. With this design, coding around those limitations is not easy. In the current model, everything could be done 100% accessibly. Why it isn&#x27;t is a completely different problem. When everything is inherently physical, though, accessibility is not just about the code, it involves much more parts, such as automated devices to move things around. Considering how expensive devices made for accessibility are (a braille display is usually well over $1000), that would be a huge setback. I think the beautiful thing about computers and technology is that you&#x27;re not tied to any physical medium and that information can flow freely between devices that can represent it in different ways. Now, there can be ten programmers working on a codebase, where one person uses a normal Windows box with a lot of GUI editors, another one uses Linux in text mode with vim, a third one has a Mac Mini with a screen reader and no monitor attached (my also blind friend programs like that), and the fourth uses switches, eye movement sensors or voice-recognition technology because they&#x27;re physically disabled (see <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;YRyYIIFKsdU?t=501" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;YRyYIIFKsdU?t=501</a>). In other words, when everything is purely digital, you can consume and manipulate information  in any form you like and in any form the computer can work with. It can be on a smartphone screen and with your finger, on a TV with a remote, through a voice-controlled speaker or a laptop with a keyboard, the choice is yours. The information is purely digital and not tied to a particular medium. However, in Dynamicland, the information is mostly physical and it&#x27;s the computer that needs to process it, not the other way around. That makes consuming the information through a different medium than it was originally presented with very difficult. It would be possible for a computer to describe a Dynamicland environment for the blind, but it wouldn&#x27;t be easy for a blind person to write the code on Paper. In a normal computer environment, such a person can just use a different tool (AKA a screen reader instead of a display) and work on the level of their sighted peers. However, a dYnamicland environment makes such things impossible.<p>I recognize the limited Value of Dynamicland as an exercise environment, maybe like Scratch. Even in that form, special considerations would need to be put so that disabled people have an alternative way of doing the same exercises.<p>Dynamicland makes a lot of other things, not related to accessibility, harder too. For example, how do you deal with larger codebases or distributed teams? How do you quickly collaborate on one piece of paper while being in two different places? Very simple to do for a Google doc. Almost impossible to do here.<p>The idea is kind of interesting but it would be only worth it in a pre-internet age. In 2018, people expect realtime collaboration with people in different parts of the world and with Dynamicland, that&#x27;s not going to happen.