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Epilogue
Really one of the very largest problems that is facing the Earth just now is rarely mentioned, and that is the spread of ugliness.
– Christopher Alexander1 Christopher Alexander - Life in Buildings (Full)
I have already mentioned the Engelbartian brick in one of the previous articles:
And I must say: there's just too many things on the computer that feel like that brick.
For me, Project Mage is all about getting myself rid of that feeling, it's about stripping the brick away, or, more like, building a pen without a brick.
Interestingly, this project happens to revolve around writing. Around text. And what an amusing thing: Engelbart presented a structural text editor made by his lab back in 1968. In a famous demo, he shows this editor along with a mouse and a piano-like keypad.
It looks like only the mouse has stuck around. And remote video calls.
But the editor wasn't bad by any means. Information could even be tagged and folded and searched and narrowed.
And, yeah, there's no in-place editing and no many other things. But for 1968? That editor was and is fabulous. It's even configurable to a point.
Appears like we got stuck with bricks instead. And the whole tech community have fallen into the plain text mania, without ever fully realizing that it's a trap.
Pretty typical of tech, you might say: much like all modern OSes are the same OS, much like most programming languages are the same language, so are most "powerful" editors are some highly-opinionated variations of Emacs.
So, why is personal computing so bad?
I think one of the most important causes of ugliness is the lack of integration, the lack of homogeneity (interoperation capability between the building blocks of a system).
And homogeneity by itself won't do wonders, but it can enable flexibility and power, and those do lead to wonders.
It's not just for the capability, though. Capability and power in the realm of interactive computing are almost always meant to gain comfort: good tools give us the freedom not to think about them.
Comfort: the truly powerful applications aren't supposed to be applications, they are supposed to be environments living within environments.
And, currently, there are almost no good environments in widespread use. And without that you can't have power, and, so, you can't have usability.
With Mage, I am only addressing a small part of the ugliness for the casual user. But, perhaps, a decent one for the power user.2 But, surely, a powerful tool can always be configured to be suitable for the casual user too, for someone who only needs it immediately just for the features; especially if the distribution and configuration mechanisms are sufficiently well-developed (and, in Mage, I hope to make them so).
Mage, for now, is mostly about personal GUI-building, text-editing, note-taking and project tracking.
Of course, there have been, and there are, now, many other kinds of projects that try to resolve the mess, alleviate some of the discomfort.
But most such efforts typically concentrate on fixing a very focused set of problems. Some people aren't satisfied with their IDE for a particular language, so they write an IDE for that language. Some don't like their text editor, so they write the right one. Same goes for the terminal emulators and various tools. (I discuss some of these in All Else is Not Enough.)
But there's typically no overarching system. No system of cohesive building blocks. No integration. And you can't get either quality or true power or true comfort without these.
Typically, there are no principles either. And, then, principles are hard to have if you are not in control of your environment. The rest of the world makes small islands of improvement operate by their own old rules: ugliness, like insanity, is contagious.
Naturally, there's no wide adoption even of such tools that have the right ideas, them being too peculiar to fit into the surrounding ecosystem or ways of doing things. And just so, it often seems like we are stuck.
And so, we simply get by.
And that's just sad.
And I think it's OK to abandon the old stuff sometimes. And we will, eventually.
We need only be ambitious enough to build an ecosystem of its own. A flexible environment. Something that can be sufficiently independent of all the rest.
Something that rejects the ugliness.
I don't even think we have to aim for perfection, not right away.
And that's… liberating.
Footnotes:
But, surely, a powerful tool can always be configured to be suitable for the casual user too, for someone who only needs it immediately just for the features; especially if the distribution and configuration mechanisms are sufficiently well-developed (and, in Mage, I hope to make them so).