One of the problems is that unlike consumer interfaces, which have given rise to the whole specialized profession of UI/UX designer, producer interfaces in the early, fast-evolving stages of a technology are built by the producers themselves, not a specialized separate profession
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I'm reading a lot about 17th century science now, and it's amazing the degree which early scientists were also the early instrument makers (Galileo, Huygens). The separation into tool designers vs. producer-users didn't happen till the 1670s or so.
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Now the thing about the computer as a producer's tool is that it is so powerful and capable, it hasn't stopped evolving rapidly since Day 1, which means it's never plateaued into a zone where a tool-maker class (a producer-side UI/UX class) can take over fully.
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Ie, the only people who can move this forward are people who use computers for production at the edge of its evolving capabilities.
One subset (the command-line purists) has decided not to try. Instead, command line prowess becomes the status thing.
Is there a subset trying?
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It's not been entirely static. I think version control and package management have been huge conceptual and implemented leaps in production UI/UX thinking. But it's so limited...
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And unfortunately it's almost all limited to actual programmers. People who use the computer as a tool for other purposes, like say image manipulation or data analysis without coding... they haven't been able to design/customize/evolve/innovate their own tool environments much
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Actually it's worse: it's not even just programmers. Even most experienced programmers aren't deep in enough to do more than say customize emacs or their IDE. The actual evolution is driven by programmers' programmers -- systems programmers.
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Like Git, arguably the biggest innovation in producer-side UI/UX, is a programmer's shop tool built by the ultimate programmers' programmer, Linus Torvalds. These people use computers for one very narrow kind of production work: making better computers.
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We need Linus Torvalds level people trying to think up better, broader producer-side systemic UX metaphors. Like a "workshop" or "kitchen" or "lab" metaphor for the computer.
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