thinking in tunes

[David Manifold]

On Tue, 23 Jun 1998, William Tanksley wrote:

> I understand what you're saying here.
> 
> However, one of our dreams for Tunes is that it be easy to use and learn.  This
> means that it has to somehow fit into the way humans tend to think, learn, and
> act.  This is a pre-existing reality --- no amount of wishful thinking on our
> part will make it go away, and if we fail to study it properly Tunes will not
> be easy to use and learn.
> 
> Viewed from that perspective, existing systems are (essentially) violations of
> the Laws of Nature (if you'll pardon me the slight exaggeration).   We wish to
> build a system which recognises and correctly follows those Laws.

Oh, I had no idea you were talking about the way people think.  But you
have to consider the question, will Tunes be designed to fit the way
people think, or will people change their thinking to fit Tunes?  Maybe
current systems are superficial, and it is obvious that trying to think in
them is going to be very painful.  Instead of modeling Tunes after the way
people have thought in the past, we might model it after the way we want
to think in the future.  You do have a very good point.  Now, for me, I
don't have to do the research you speak of.  I am instinctively planning
Tunes to fit how I want to think, learn, and act on my computer.  The
question is whether anyone else cares to share my model.  If not, they
have a chance right now to speak up and modify Tunes to help fit their
model as well.  But I'm not too terribly worried about it.  Tunes is
designed to be changeable.  It's very likely that anyone else can modify
it to fit their model, after it's done.  After all, TUNES is designed to
be a toolkit to design your own personal, "perfect" OS, perfect for you
because you made it yourself. 

> :-)

:-)

> It's interesting how our different viewpoints color our ways of describing the
> problem, isn't it?  And most interesting how both of our ways of describing the
> problem are useful.

Yup.  Do you want a tunes.org address?

David Manifold <dem@tunes.org>