Programmers are not different, they need simple UIs
<i>... I want to stress how important is the concept of simplicity, not just in graphical UIs, but also in UIs designed for programmers.</i><p>I've always felt sad that this dichotomy is so strong in our industry. There are graphical tools for proles and then there are text-based tools for programmers, and never the two shall mix.<p>It didn't have to be this way. Smalltalk was an integrated graphical system for both programmers and users already 40 years ago. Something like the Smalltalk class browser with visual editing of live code would feel revolutionary even today compared to most of the systems we have.<p>But we're seemingly stuck with another '70s approach, that of Unix: streams of plain text, UIs based on undiscoverable and inconsistent command line argument arrays, all glued together with a spider's web of incredibly fragile string-replacement tools like shell scripts and templates.