There's so much I love about this article. The contrast between shallowly & deeply embedded software, software that tries to use available abstractions & to integrate tightly versus software that rebuilds it's own microsm means so much to me. I'm so glad to have words for it.
To me, we have only begun to experiment with how to interoperate. APIs were what everyone was talking about & trying to do in the aughts, but sometimes after that, we started only being interested in driving our own products forwards, the APIs and extensions all shut down (Spotify for example had a fantastic extension system that got closed).
There's a lot of forgotten frontiers to the web. They still dwell there, with IMO high potential. Making the web less opaque, more genuine, more honest: it's what I see as one of the most promising ways to counter the curse of modern computing, to begin to illuminate what it is that computing is. Which, based off some recent coversations, seems like a topic quite a few others have interests & hopes for, feel needs some really radical help: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28803455 .
To me, we have only begun to experiment with how to interoperate. APIs were what everyone was talking about & trying to do in the aughts, but sometimes after that, we started only being interested in driving our own products forwards, the APIs and extensions all shut down (Spotify for example had a fantastic extension system that got closed).
There's a lot of forgotten frontiers to the web. They still dwell there, with IMO high potential. Making the web less opaque, more genuine, more honest: it's what I see as one of the most promising ways to counter the curse of modern computing, to begin to illuminate what it is that computing is. Which, based off some recent coversations, seems like a topic quite a few others have interests & hopes for, feel needs some really radical help: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28803455 .