I think I came up with this slogan at Parc during discussions wrt children, end-users, user-interfaces, and programming languages. Chuck Thacker (the genius behind the Parc hardware) also liked it and adopted it as a principle for many of his projects.

So e.g. Smalltalk needed to work with children and end-users even more intuitively than (say) JOSS or Logo. But we also wanted to write the entire system in itself, so that those who were curious — especially later on — could “pop any hood” in the system and see a live program/object written in exactly the same terms as what the children were learning.

Similarly, the GUI had to be easily learnable by children, but — looking ahead — it had to handle “50,000 kinds of things we hadn’t thought of done by 50,000 programmers we hadn’t met” and be as simple as possible.

Another part of this was that we were determined to have a very easy to learn UI would also incorporate end-user programming (scripting) as a natural part of it — in other words to combine what had to be simple yet possible with the programming language with what had to be simple yet possible with the UI.

The general zeitgeist against this idea — both back then and now. Basically: those artifacts that do simple things usually wall off next levels of complexity, and those that do complex things don’t do anything simply.

But, given that there have been some really good examples of how to do both, it’s hard not to see most computer people as (a) not caring, or (b) being lazy or unskilled, or (c) both.

It’s worth pondering this. One argument against mine, is that “people need and want ‘appliances’ “ that only have one function.

I would say, “Well, that’s the simple part, now show me how the next idea and need the end-user has that is not directly in the surface appliance can be realized” (this is the enormous difference between a computer artifact and anything made from atoms — and it means that the analogy to appliances is not a very good one). There is just no reason not to allow and make possible safe “hood popping” …