I’m a utopian, in that I don’t believe that computers are a mistake. I have big criticisms about particular technical decisions, but I don’t think those decisions were inevitable. An alternate computer universe, as projected from trends thirty years ago and earlier, was possible; with care and effort, it still is.
The biggest structural problem I see is a failure to distinguish between two different kinds of computing that have fundamentally different needs.
Big computing is computing at-scale. It’s the kind of thing anybody in the software industry is used to, and anyone not in the software industry is accustomed to complaining about. Big computing is client-server. Big computing processes big data. Big computing has millions of users. Big computing hides ‘advanced settings’ behind a checkbox or a button so ‘regular people’ don’t get intimidated. Big computing has maintainers, bug trackers, and devops on call. Big computing is worried about accidentally committing experimental code to prod. Big computing writes tests, cares about strong typing, and writes things in java because it’s easier for HR to find qualified candidates that way. Big computing is worried about job security. Big computing has a project manager and stock options. Big computing ships.
Small computing never died, but you wouldn’t know it from reading Hacker News. Small computing has an average user count of one. Small computing is peer to peer, and human scale. Small computing does exactly what the end user wants, because the end user is the…