A World Without Apps

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5 points·Jonovono··4 comments

Im very compelled, have spent a lot of time working towards this kind of future. Work like 9p, of externalizing state & unpacking it, feels key.

In general, trying to make a pallete of tools on hand, rather than big apps with many tools inside, feels like something the command line alone has going for it at this time. It's hard to imagine otherwise. A lot of this talk is about the idea of a substrate, but execution, running things, composing processes... the what do we do once we have a substrate craves more exploration.

I believe in this future with an intense belief; I dont see what we are up to as good for humanity. We build infernal machines, trapping users inside tools. This is not an acceptable setup, we are not able to engage genuinely with the material about us; the consumer experience must make outroads to become more than shadow play, more than a shadow of marionettes for those chained to the wall.

I think the simple ASCII text file was the peak of universally applicable computing. It was a universal substrate for information. It wasn't a good fit for many reasons, but almost everything could understand and deal with it.

We need a new substrate for richly formatted text, sound, images, video, etc. HTML isn't it, nor is RTF or DOCX, PDF, etc.

Have you seen anything trying to fill that gap? What about markdown? Or s-expressions? ;p

Like the choice of ASCII, no matter what gets picked, someone will have a problem with it. Also like EBCDIC/ASCII, no matter who gets there first, it might not win anyway, so just pick something that works for you, explain it well enough to implement it, and open source it when you're done, to increase the odds a bit. Like Ward Christensen did with Modem7, which became XMODEM, which became the Xmodem protocol.

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