CompuServe Messages

In the Amiga market, or in any small market or niche market, you often find one or two relatively inexperienced programmer slash entrepreneur types running the company… instead, I think it's helpful to think of two titles, "software designer" and "programmer." Or "metaprogrammer" and "programmer". One works on design and architecture issues, the other does the actual coding. A successful metaprogrammer will study products without concern for platform – they have the luxuries of finding beauty in design and interface, while the programmer finds beauty in low-level efficiency, algorithms that enhance the design, etc. There are a lot of very bad interfaces out there on any platform. But as Frank Zappa said, there can be no progress without deviation from the norm. I believe there is growing consensus about many issues of software design. They're not the last word, but they're significant measures of progress. The Amiga market has had a lot of deviant user interfaces, in the sense that they don't look like anything else out there. Far too often, I don't think they've held significant advances, which makes them historical curiousities, not ground-breaking efforts.