I'm with the Raskins, the problems derive from interacting with computers via applications. This may or may not be at the forefront of your mind but your fondness of Lisp and Smalltalk systems supports my claim. Other systems such as Oberon fall into this camp but I would also include early PC systems like the Commodore 64 and DOS machines, even though they loaded individual applications.
The commonality with these systems is the somewhat ubiquitous interface. I think this is why power users love the command line. These HCIs reduce the cognitive load of the application model where there are wildly disparate UIs to deal with on a continual basis. The growth of "web apps" has made this exponentially worse on the user because they're not bound by widget tool kits.
I also see modern markers to support the claim. From what I understand, in China a huge amount of activity on smartphones that we would conduct through various apps, they conduct through WeChat and WeChat bots. They do this because it's more convenient and my claim is this is the normie's equivalent of attempting to push all their computing needs into Emacs.
It is absolutely nuts that we don't have a greater diversity of computing platforms (as we did in 80s 90s) considering we have such widely adopted standards today that overcome the "compatibility" problems. There's fertile ground for exploring more Smalltalk/Oberon/Hypercard/Lisp-machine like computing systems, with the confidence that they will be able to interact in a meaningful way with the outside world.
Unfortunately, Computer Science continues to train people in Unix.
> It is absolutely nuts that we don't have a greater diversity of computing platforms (as we did in 80s 90s)
I'm seeing signs of a possible resurgence here with the reduced cost of PCBs, FPGAs and the like along with the increased approach-ability to the space.
The commonality with these systems is the somewhat ubiquitous interface. I think this is why power users love the command line. These HCIs reduce the cognitive load of the application model where there are wildly disparate UIs to deal with on a continual basis. The growth of "web apps" has made this exponentially worse on the user because they're not bound by widget tool kits.
I also see modern markers to support the claim. From what I understand, in China a huge amount of activity on smartphones that we would conduct through various apps, they conduct through WeChat and WeChat bots. They do this because it's more convenient and my claim is this is the normie's equivalent of attempting to push all their computing needs into Emacs.