FatGeekUK

I love my iphone, but mostly not for the phone.
I love it because it means that wherever I go, I carry my world with me. I have amusements, music, diversion). So, far from being a device to connect me to people (as a phone should be) it is keeping me away from other people.

It’s not just me. In my late teens, I used to take a long bus journey to college (about 1.5 hours). In that time, I read, but also, over time I got to know the people I was travelling with every day. We would talk, and eventually got to know each other.

In my twenties I traveled by train a lot, and several times, I took my cat (ben, a short hair red tabby) with me. Those where amazing journeys. Ben was a great destroyer of boundaries. He would sleep in his box, on the table, lying across the open door of the cage, or would take note of my fellow passengers and introduce himself, and by association, me, to them.

Recently, I have started using public transport more, and have noticed that this opportunity no longer exists, we are all walled off from each other by our accompanying technology.

What we need is a ‘digital ben’. We need that something that breaks the ice, instead of thickening it.

Today, a friend linked me to this it is an scheme environment with extensions. It says it wants to be an environment for musicians and graphic artists to use for performance coding. There is an example here which is beautiful, haunting and inspiring.

But, watching that video, it reminds me soo much of "verse""http://www.uni-verse.org/ and a project using it called Love . It reminds me not because the two projects are similar, but for another reason.

I spent a little time playing with verse, not really enough to get any results, but enough to get the feeling that I did not ‘get’ the programming model. But watching screencasts by the author of verse, I could see he was getting amazing results.

When I watched the impromptu demo, I was struck by the same feeling. The language has amazing promise. The author is obviously able to make use of it to create wonderful things. But, looking at what was being typed, it looked like giberish.

So, I started thinking about both projects. Both verse and impromptu are systems that their authors are able to use to make incredible results very quickly. I fear that others attempting to use them would not fare so well.

So, what are these? I think they are a class of system I would like to call ‘personal expansions’. They fit tightly and intimately to the person who has created them and they have the internal models and mindset which allows them to make use of the tools to do mind boggling things. But, that because of that intimacy, it is hard for others to use them with anywhere near the same level of productivity amplification.

This is a shame, and brings me to the ‘broken promises’.

Both these tools are being pushed as ‘look what you can do’, when really, they should be honest and say ‘look what I can do’.

I am most definitely not scornful of either project, I think they are wonderful and I look forward to playing with impromptu some time when I have a few hours to spare, but probably only once I have revisited my copies of ‘The little schemer’ and ‘The seasoned schemer’.