Sunday, April 26, 2015; 12:49:58 PM Eastern
Great "Blue Sky" platforms
- #### The hairball
- Our current platform is a mess:
- 1. CSS.
- 2. HTML.
- 3. JavaScript.
- 4. A server.
- Think of how much you have to learn to become "full stack" in this world.
- At least four different syntaxes, and a CSS preprocessor.
- HTML is XML. JavaScript is like C or Pascal. The server could be written in any number of different languages. And JSON. None of them are going away.
- I've been working in this world for many years, and right now would be at a loss to write a canonical "hello world" app.
- What a Tower of Babel. What an opportunity to topple it, esp given all the people these days who want to program.
- #### It grows when it's simple
- The big strides in tech happen when the platform gets reduced to simplicity. Examples include:
- 1. Unix with C.
- 2. Apple II with UCSD P-System.
- 3. MS-DOS with Turbo Pascal.
- 4. The Web with a plain text editor.
- #### I call these blue sky platforms
- In all these systems, lifting the hood is child's play.
- Typing and modifying "Hello World" is easy. From there, there are no huge cliffs in the way of becoming a master.
- 1995: "A platform must have potential, or open space. I call this blue sky."
- #### Digging out of the mess
- We can get back to blue sky any time we want.
- I would start from Node.js and build out.
- The web browser, as currently configured would have to be replaced by something that's thoughtfully designed. Or maybe a platform built on top of CSS+HTML+JavaScript, hiding it behind a factored interface? Not sure. But we'll never have great growth until we factor out the huge hairball sitting between ideas and implementation.