Now you've gone and changed the question, from "what will we be using" to "what will be possible?" Although many people will do something for no reason other than that it's possible, most will still be running the same old word processing, spreadsheet, and database applications. What will be possible, though, is that outfits like Microsoft will be able to write even more bloated code than they do now, full of more dazzling but otherwise useless bells and whistles that will seduce users into spending even more money they don't have for capabilities they don't need. And the programs will become so complex that the consulting and training industries will continue to grow, while puzzled users will scratch their heads and wonder why things couldn't be simpler.
On computer applications in the year 2001, In alt.folklore.computers, 16/03/94.
Alex Johnson of the Knight-Ridder/Tribune News Service reports that soon afterward, Dave Barry admitted to hacking Ms. [Tonya] Harding's e-mail account himself. Mr. Barry vigorously defended his actions. saying that reporters do such things "... all the time." Mr. Barry's editor at the Miami Herald also defended Mr. Barry's actions, likening them to watching the dismemberment of chickens on television.
Man is a small thing, and the night is very large and full of wonders.
The Laughter of the Gods
If you want to write software that's fast or portable or well structured, despite years of evolution, you have to care about it and put effort into it. It's easy to be sloppy, but it comes back to haunt you. The only way to make something fast is to care about performance from the beginning and put real effort into getting it. The only way to keep the code clean and maintainable is to constantly put effort into that aspect of it. Resist the temptation to make quick fixes. Or if a quick fix just has to be done for some reason, make a point of going back and doing it right. These things do not happen automatically and they won't happen if you don't care about them. The main reason why a lot of software today is bloated and complicated and obscure and buggy is that people don't care. They may care in the sense that if you ask them they say, "Yes, we care," but the fact is they don't put any effort into it. They don't care enough to work on it.
Quoted In Amateur Computerist vol. 5 no. 1/2
The notion that an anonymous posting needs to be traceable to its source is a product of the unification of the old time conservative desire to squelch free speech with the new fangled politically correct liberal desire to squelch free speech.
I hope you'll forgive me for not bothering to consult the actual Windoze help pages for the program. If this were Unix and manpages, I would expect and deserve criticism for not RTFMing, but Windoze help without fail exhausts my patience with page after hypertext page explaining that I should click on the "open file" button to open a file, and never answering any real questions that anyone above sea slug on the neuron count scale would really ask.
In comp.os.unix.advocacy.
There's an old story about the person who wished his computer were as easy to use as his telephone. That wish has come true, since I no longer know how to use my telephone.
The weirder you're going to behave, the more normal you should look. It works in reverse, too. When I see a kid with three or four rings in his nose, I know there is absolutely nothing extraordinary about that person.
Give War a Chance
Einstein argued that there must be simplified explanations of nature, because God is not capricious or arbitrary. No such faith comforts the software engineer.
"No Silver Bullet", IEEE Computer, April 1987
C++ is too complicated. At the moment, it's impossible for me to write portable code that I believe would work on lots of different systems, unless I avoid all exotic features. Whenever the C++ language designers had two competing ideas as to how they should solve some problem, they said "OK, we'll do them both". So the language is too baroque for my taste.
In a Computer Literacy Bookshops interview.
"That's the duty of the old," said the Librarian, "to be anxious on behalf of the young. And the duty of the young is to scorn the anxiety of the old."
The Golden Compass
Also, you have to understand...when I was a very young kid, I went to visit my grandfather's grave. My grandfather was an alcoholic who died in the gutter. Literally. And was buried in a pauper's grave. Ever been to a pauper's grave? Lead pipe. Brass number. You check the roster to find out who's buried. No name, no date. He passed through his life without leaving footprints. It terrified me beyond the capacity of words to convey to you.
In rec.arts.sf.tv.babylon5.
"The journey is long, the end uncertain, and there is more dark along the way than light, but you can whistle. Come with me by the wall of the great tombyards of all time which lie a billion years ahead. What shall we whistle as we stroll in our rocket, hoping to make it by the vast darkness where shadows wait to seize and keep us?
"Follow me.
"I know a tune.
"Here...listen."
Mars and the Mind of Man
To understand this whole area, you have to stop thinking like a viewer and start thinking like a network programming exec. (Start by lowering your IQ about 15 points.)
In rec.arts.sf.tv.babylon5.
. . . the Intelligentsia (scientists apart) are losing all touch with, and all influence over, nearly the whole human race. Our most esteemed poets and critics are read by our most esteemed critics and poets (who don't usually like them much) and nobody else takes any notice. An increasing number of highly literate people simply ignore what the 'Highbrows' are doing. It says nothing to them. The Highbrows in return ignore and insult them.
Hoarders can get power over you by making programs proprietary because you feeling that you need the programs. The more you get used to feeling you need them, the harder it is to refuse demands. That's why using proprietary programs like Mathematica is not good for you: it trains you to a habit of helplessness.
The way make yourself immune to the owners' power is to say, "I don't need this program. And with those conditions, I don't want it."
In gnu.misc.discuss.
So it was with a morbid curiosity that I got a hold of (without paying) Christopher Priest's book on the long-awaited The Last Dangerous Visions. I expected it to be about the same caliber as the recent wave of harassment against [Harlan] Ellison, enacted mainly by Charles Platt and Gary Groth; two entities recognizable as human beings solely through a vague fealty to bilateral symmetry.
In rec.arts.sf.tv.babylon5.
When I was 15, we had one of those things where you do a battery of tests and then they bring a careers advisor in to talk to you about careers, and the careers advisor said, "What do you want to do?" And I said, "I want to write American comics." And there was a very, very, very long pause. And then he said, "Well, how do you go about doing that?" And I said, "Well, you're the careers advisor, I thought you were gonna tell me." And there was another really, really, really long pause, and then he looked at me rather desperately and said, "Have you ever thought about accountancy?"
In a radio interview, on "To The Best Of Our Knowledge", broadcast May 31, 1995.
The error which underlies the very existence of this debate is that there is some kind of perfect Platonic form of the computer language, which some real languages reflect more perfectly than others. Plato was brilliant for his time but reality is not expressable in terms of arbitrary visions of perfection, and furthermore, one programmer's ideal is often another's hell.
In comp.lang.modula3
All governments, without exception, lie all the time, on every subject. They lie constantly, impenitently, and unashamedly. Nothing that any government ever says, at any time, can be assumed to be true. The sooner you recognize this fact, the easier and more pleasant your life will become.
Quoted from memory by Charles Haines, in a letter to the editor of the Toronto Globe and Mail, Oct. 28, 1995
Only the person who has been trained to think can be trusted to feel.
I was always brought up to believe that language is the master, you are the servant. I was taught to believe that language is almost out of control and you can barely hold on to it.
The record demonstrates that the growth of the Internet has been and continues to be phenomenal. As a matter of constitutional tradition, in the absence of evidence to the contrary, we presume that governmental regulation of the content of speech is more likely to interfere with the free exchange of ideas than to encourage it. The interest in encouraging freedom of expression in a democratic society outweighs any theoretical but unproven benefit of censorship.