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The rush of stumbling across prior art that resonates precisely with what you're trying to do
yes!!!
The Apple problem

It's funny how things go in circles...

These Adaptive Design ideas were deeply inspired by Stewart Brand's How Buildings Learn, which I only came across recently after years of thinking about this in the software context

Participatory Design is another keyword I want to read more on.. feels like I've only skimmed the surface of a whole field there

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Geoffrey Litt
@geoffreylitt
A theory about why tools like Airtable and Notion are so compelling: they provide a much-needed synthesis between the design philosophies of UNIX and Apple.

Short thread:
UNIX is still the best working example of "tools not apps": small sharp tools that the user can flexibly compose to meet their needs.

Once you've written a few bash pipelines, it's hard to be satisfied with disconnected, siloed "apps"
The problem is, while the roots are solid, the terminal as UI is extremely hostile to users, esp beginners. No discoverability, cryptic flags, lots of cruft and chaos.

Read 11 tweets
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Geoffrey Litt
@geoffreylitt
There's a saying that writing software is more like tending a garden than constructing a building -- things constantly change.

But the more I learn about how buildings evolve, I think this process is actually a perfect analogy for designing software!

Thread:
The gardening analogy originated in The Pragmatic Programmer (afaik).

The claim: buildings are designed once and stable forever. But in a garden, things grow organically, you need to constantly prune and weed and tend. Aka, refactoring.
I found this framing helpful as an early programmer, but ultimately a bit hollow. Software adapts in response to changing human needs. It doesn't just naturally grow like a plant. The fundamental motivations seem different.
Read 15 tweets
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Geoffrey Litt
@geoffreylitt
Finding some gems in this history of Applescript:
dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.114…

1) Applescript originally had other dialects besides English!? Including a "professional" syntax that never shipped
I love this: "all our other products are localized, why not our scripting lang?"

(seems like projectional editing, but with a text editor rather than structured editor, interesting compromise...🤔)
Apparently this effort eventually ended because app developers didn't provide app-specific terminology in different languages
Read 13 tweets

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