For TBaehr Re: XPL, DLG, Development of XY4, etc.

[holmgrn@xxxxxxxx]

Dear TBaehr:

I take your points. But I think you missed mine! I never
mentioned the quality of the menus per se, or the competence of
the coders, or their sincerity, which seem to be your primary
concerns. And I wholeheartedly agree that Xy4 is far more
productive than 3+ in every way.
I was cynical, not about the spirit in the XyQuest workplace, but
about the computer culture of authoritarian inflexible
button-pushing of which these menus are simply a manifestation.
I think this culture promotes, and profits by, ignorance. I
think the promise of computers, once perceived as an instrument
by which individuals seized control of their lives & bent dumb
machines to their own highly personalized service -- no two the
same -- is less and less a realistic option for people who simply
take canned goods home from Egghead, and haven't a clue how they
work, nor are offered any possibility of changing the way they
work. That's the excitement of computing, not that we can all be
"common" users. It did NOT have to work out this way! The
bloody machine was supposed to be an _antidote_ to mass culture!
But the truth of it increasingly is, we now work for these
machines. If you aren't a common user, apply elsewhere. The
fact that you M. Baehr equate development of menus with "taking
XyWrite into the modern era", and seem wholeheartedly to endorse
it, and want to participate in it, means only that our opinions differ
(not that I necessarily labor under "misconceptions"); and that
at XyQuest these more or less philosophical questions no longer
burn. Too bad. They used to: the whole ethic was explicitly,
triumphantly, anti-standard.

Robert Holmgren holmgrn@xxxxxxxx