Over on lobste.rs I said that I don’t hold out much hope for another “blue plane” style event in developer tools. In one of Alan Kay’s presentations, he referred to the ordinary way of things as the pink plane, and incremental advances in the state of affairs being movements in that plane. Like the square in Edwin Abbot’s Flatland that encounters a sphere, a development could take us out of the pink plane into the (orthogonal) blue plane. These blue plane ideas are rare because like the square, it’s hard to even conceive of life outside the pink plane.
In what may just be a surprising coincidence, Apple engineers used Blue and Pink to refer to features in evolutionary and revolutionary developments of their operating system.
Software engineering tooling is, for the majority of developers, in a phase of conservative retreat
Build UIs on the web and you probably won’t use a graphical builder, you’ll type HTML and JavaScript (and maybe JSX) into a text editor.
Build native apps and even where there is a GUI builder, you’ll find people recommending against its use and wanting to do things “programmatically” (by which they mean “through typing”, even though the GUI builder tools are another way to construct a program).
In the last couple of decades, interest in CASE tooling has shrunk to conservative interest in text editors with some syntax highlighting, like vim or Atom. Gone even is the “build and run” button from IDEs, to be replaced with command-line invocations of grunt tasks (a fancy phrase meaning shell scripts), npm scripts (a fancy phrase meaning shell scripts) or rake tasks (you get the idea).
Where previously there were live development environments embedded in the deployment environment (and the Javascript VM is almost perfectly designed for that task), there is now console.log and unit tests. The height of advanced interaction with your programming tools are the REPL (an interactive shell) and the Playground/InstaREPL (an interactive shell that echoes stdin and stdout in different places).
For the most part, and I say that to avoid the inevitable commenter who thinks that a counterexample like LabView or Mathematica or that one person they met who uses Expression Blend renders the whole argument broken, developers have doubled down on the ceremony of programming: the typing of arcane text into an 80×24 character display. Now to be fair, text is an efficient and compact graphical representation of a linear sequence of connected concepts. But it is not the only one, nor the most efficient nor most compact, and neither are many software systems linear.
The rewards in making software to make software are scarce.
You can do like IntelliJ do, and make a better version of the 80×24 text entry thing. You can work for a platform vendor, and make their version of the 80×24 thing. You can go and get an engineering grade 6 or above job in Silicon Valley and tell your manager that whatever it is their business does, you’re going to focus on the 80×24 thing (“at scale”) instead.
What you don’t seem to be able to do is to disrupt the 80×24 thing. It’s free (at least as in beer), it’s ubiquitous, and whether or not it’s as good as it could be it certainly seems to be good enough for the people who not only get paid to make bad software, but get paid again to fix it.
