Mon, 27 Jan 2003
Jaron Lanier On Phenotropic Computing
java.sun.com has an interesting conversation with Jaron Lanier concerning Jaron's current research interests, which involve finding better ways to solve complex programming problems.
Jaron's commentary on the loss of faith amongst the programming multitudes is interesting:
And at that point, there's a danger that you lose the faith that used to exist in prior generations: that computing could get better at a fundamental level. And since almost everybody in the whole profession goes through the academic world and out into the industrial world, everyone gets consumed in this way. So, I'm afraid we have lost our greater ambitions, and that deeply concerns me.
That thought really resonated with me since I've seen this occur over the dot com era to a certain extent. Attitudinally, it's like you're stuck in a coal mine in West Virginia for the rest of your life.
Finally, Sun asks Jaron whether he's got any advice for developers just starting out and he offers the following:
There's a lot I would say. If you're interested in user interfaces, there's a wonderful opportunity these days to push what a user interface can be. If a user interface gives a user some degree of power, try to figure out if you can give the user more power, while still keeping it inspiring and easy to use. Can you do it? For instance, could you design a search engine that would encourage people to do more complex searches than they can do on a service like Google today, but still do them easily? I haven't seen a really good visual interface, for instance, for setting up searches on Google. Could you do that? Could you suddenly make masses of people do much more specific and effective searches than they currently are doing just by making a better user interface?
Yep. That's the one that interests me. The rich UI interface to google. I had that goal when I wrote swingin google almost a year ago now and somehow it got lost in the painful experience of dealing with swing. I'm gonna take another stab at it with some other tools, but I need to make the tool decision first since what is possible is predicated on a tool choice. Isn't that ass-backwards? Isn't that part of the problem, that the UI that you produce is inexorably predictable from the toolset that you choose? Hmm...
Posted at: 18:29 | permalink
