This is the complete essay, along with comments from another author to update it to 2004.
However, the bit that I considered his real point - not the distressingly technical minutiae but the fundamental bedrock of the essay - was the whole 'distillation' concept, or Morlocks/Eloi as he put it, the whole section on Disney World. Nobody has an infinite amount of time to learn everything, so being able to skillfully boil a topic into the essentials is an ability much in demand. I consider myself a technically-adept user. I am working towards a Information Science degree. I can program well in C, COBOL, Java, and an assortment of lesser scripting languages.
Despite all of this, a good 80% of my computer time at home is well covered by "Start Firefox", "Start a game", and "Start my IM client". My life would not be noticeably improved by typing the commands in as opposed to clicking an icon. I do not think I am atypical in this regard, and you could really simplify things past even point into something more akin to the PS3/PSP interface and cover most of what I do, and sell the result to more people... which is exactly what happened.
The upshot is you aren't a lone outcast, and even if hacker-friendly system becomes the exception more than the rule, it'll still EXIST. The Morlocks of the world have money too, after all. It's not a coincidence that the very first thing Apple's own team of programmers did with the original Macintosh was add in a proper command line interface.
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This is the complete essay, along with comments from another author to update it to 2004.
However, the bit that I considered his real point - not the distressingly technical minutiae but the fundamental bedrock of the essay - was the whole 'distillation' concept, or Morlocks/Eloi as he put it, the whole section on Disney World. Nobody has an infinite amount of time to learn everything, so being able to skillfully boil a topic into the essentials is an ability much in demand. I consider myself a technically-adept user. I am working towards a Information Science degree. I can program well in C, COBOL, Java, and an assortment of lesser scripting languages.
Despite all of this, a good 80% of my computer time at home is well covered by "Start Firefox", "Start a game", and "Start my IM client". My life would not be noticeably improved by typing the commands in as opposed to clicking an icon. I do not think I am atypical in this regard, and you could really simplify things past even point into something more akin to the PS3/PSP interface and cover most of what I do, and sell the result to more people... which is exactly what happened.
The upshot is you aren't a lone outcast, and even if hacker-friendly system becomes the exception more than the rule, it'll still EXIST. The Morlocks of the world have money too, after all. It's not a coincidence that the very first thing Apple's own team of programmers did with the original Macintosh was add in a proper command line interface.