Users Or Consumers

Detlev Zundel — Mon, 19 Nov 2018 16:40:07 GMT

While at university in the previous millennium, I was very much in love with the Smalltalk language and especially the Smalltalk system. Built on top of the core language, the latter includes the possibility to study and modify every aspect of the whole system through the class browser and image persistence. Such a setup allowed a freedom of creativity that I since miss in programming. The mythical Lisp machine must have been of a similar pedigree but having never used such a machine this is only what I can guess by reading about it.

This nice blog post by J.V. Toups reminded me of those days but also looks at this from a very different, yet interesting, angle. Just how much potential of our digital computers do we lose every second by having divided the world into a tiny class of "producers" and a gigantic class of "users" with all the rest of the world in it. Being patronized, members of the last class unfortunately have no idea whatsoever about how empowering computers really can be. If the system is designed to include the user, then it only takes a small amount of time to learn the basics of how to "program" them.

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Users Or Consumers