diary at Telent Netowrks

I'm thinking hard about the cirCLe project at the moment: not the#

Wed, 03 Mar 2004 16:31:23 +0000

I'm thinking hard about the cirCLe project at the moment: not the attempt last year to produce and charge for a CD full of Lisp software, but the overall objective of a free lisp-based system. This particular chunk of text started life as "Why I must write cirCLe" in the project goals document, but clearly it wants to be longer than the single paragraph demanded there. It also wants to be coherent, and isn't entirely yet, so consider this an early draft

The GNU operating system is nearly done. The OS kernels, libraries, basic programming tools and Unix-compatible utilities in systems based on Linux and other free Unixlike kernels are good enough that they've displaced proprietary Unixes and other operating systems for many purposes. What next? One obvious answer is "applications"

For many hackers, working on free operating system components has been an opportunity to write code that they themselves want to use ("scratching an itch") and the resulting code has been reliable and high-quality. But now we're writing for "nontechnical" people, and we're to believe that

This is only partly true. The user should not need to know the innards of a piece of software to use it effectively, but there's a difference between making it unnecessary to learn more and making it difficult to learn more.

I'm not suggesting that anybody intends to make it difficult, but when the typical user is not expected even to try to investigate their software, then extensibility, remote control and programmable interfaces are - quite reasonably - going to be a low priority. Better just to work on the features that the user wants.

So what's likely to happen? Users have no way to contribute back to the software they're using. Everyone knows the first rule of technical support: "``the person on the other end of the phone is an idiot''. Curiously, this applies no matter whether you're asking the questions or answering them". Without the basis for mutual respect between the people writing software and the people using it, do we really have a community? More pragmatically, if the only people with the expertise to make changes to our free software system are the people who wrote it, are we really so much better off than we would have been with a proprietary system?

I contend that the answer is "no"; that this disconnect between developers and users is harmful, and that we need a system where the users and the developers are on equal terms and have the same opportunities and the same tools. So we must use a language expressive enough that we can write the whole system in it; where the extension language and the implementation language are the same.