My Vision
The Dream
My mother can build an application to track her recipes.
My young daughters can learn how to interact with data (”program”) in a rich, interactive way.
My wife is able to access, transform, and report on all our family data in a free-form and unconstrained manner.
I can expose my music, bookmarks, photos, documents, etc. to anyone I choose, allowing them to access and transform my data as they do their own.
The notion of what is “writing an application” and “using an application”, “design-time” and “runtime”, and “developer” and “user” are gone.
How We Get There
In order to achieve the above, I believe that we need to build three things:
A universal way for “real people” to securely access and publish structured and unstructured information (“Infobus”).
A simple, but powerful language for “real people” to express transformations (views, …) of this information (“Infoscript”).
A rich user experience that allows “real people” to do this information access/publishing/transformation within (“Shell”).
I have been executing on the above vision for at least 5 years.
I often use this text as a way of describing the “in the limit” goal of our work on “Oslo” and other efforts.
I just realized today that I have never posted it publically, so I thought I would share.
Is it laudable? I think so. Will it be hard? Of course. Is it achievable? Absolutely.
Your Possibly Related Posts (automatically generated) are umm, interesting.
I love The Dream. As far as How We Get There, I’m sure you see Oslo/Quadrant as part of the solution, but I also see Live Mesh/Framework as Infobus, LiveFX MeshScripts++ as Infoscript, and something like Popfly / “Yahoo Pipes for AtomPub” as Shell.
I touch on some of this at the end of this post:
http://orand.blogspot.com/2009/01/meshscript-ideas-for-future.html
I have also dreamed about wrapping MeshScripts with an Oslo grammar.
So many amazing possibilities. It’s like WinFS is making a comeback as WebFS.
Oran
21 Jan 09 at 23:43
Sounds like you have a similar goal to that of the couchdb guys. Unstructured data (documents, no schema), self-contained (database and application server all in one program) and all that good stuf
Charlie
22 Jan 09 at 08:15
Programming, IMHO is about formalizing stuff. Thoughts are not formal. Language is not formal. Busines Processes often are not formal. Transforming them into a formalized structure is a profession – our profession.
Making this profession easier is good. We should also always do a better job in making ourselves dispensable (german überflüssig) – leveraging tools for specific domains that enable others to do “our” job.
Security is another profession. One example: once a customer sent me an excel file with adresses (for importing them). The columns where A-B-C-D-H-I-J. Well E, F and G contained the bank account data. How could he know that “hide” cells won’t be enough to do?
I don’t think – except for concrete domain solutions – “real people” will ever be able to “program”. Don’t know if I hope I’m wrong either
Still all those model-driven efforts are great to boost productivity and make the transformation from knowledge into formalized structures easier!
Lars Corneliussen
22 Jan 09 at 10:38
[...] Purdy, какие цели в конце концов имеет проект [...]
Weekly #0 (beta) | loosely coupled
22 Jan 09 at 19:33
I have to agree with Lars. I think the dream is great, and Oslo is fantastic, but I don’t think Oslo v1 or even v5 will deliver the dream. When machine intelligence has developed to the point where an expert system can guide a “real person” untrained in formal logic through the process of formalizing and bringing order to their disorganized thoughts–which I see 15-20 years away at least–then I think this dream can be realized. But even then, it will be a matter of interacting with an intelligent agent rather than “programming” in any sense that we understand.
What Oslo has to offer us NOW (meaning in the next several years, as people get over the shock of adapting to lambdas, LINQ, and ORM in EF), is tremendous productivity enhancement for those who ARE trained in formal logic.
Although, I have to admit, I think it will blur the lines somewhat. I believe there will be a small percentage of configuration-like tasks that used to be written in a general purpose language that now will be edited by someone in operations or tech support: power users and others with some familiarity with logic. Also, it may stratify programming positions, such that “script kiddies” and entry level developers (or those of mediocre ambition) will find many more opportunities to provide value authoring logic in languages that provide fewer opportunities for disaster.
Dan Vanderboom
24 Jan 09 at 00:36
[...] Development by metadouglasp on January 24th, 2009 There were a couple of good comments on my My Vision post (some on the post and otherwise) that I wanted to [...]
My Vision (the clarification) « Douglas Purdy
24 Jan 09 at 08:31
[...] out loud about the principles, scenarios, architecture, and software necessary for what he calls infobus and what I have called hosted lifebits. I started to respond in comments on Doug’s blog, but [...]
Hosted lifebits meets infobus « Jon Udell
6 Mar 09 at 16:00
[...] cannot tell you how important this view is to my personal philosophy or to the vision that I strive to [...]
Repost: Nothing is Impossible at Douglas Purdy
3 Apr 09 at 04:57
[...] you may know, my vision is all about giving people the power to create, access and share their data as they [...]
Bento at Douglas Purdy
17 Jan 10 at 05:06