My main, underlying issue with software development is I've long felt the species missed a huge opportunity to wind up truly computer literate, instead becoming dumbed-down-addicted to "Windows" and GUIs (browsers included, of course) in general. Rather than really understanding what they're doing in a reasonable command-line-favorable OS/environment, people have come to imagine that pointing/clicking/dragging/dropping constitutes computer prowess.

I think back to the early history of UNIX at Bell Labs and recall that the original "killer app", or at least the application that justified letting Kernighan, Ritchie, Thompson, etc. tinker with a miniature Multics on AT&T's dime was text processing and computer typesetting. Imagine platoons of AT&T secretaries and clerks, all banging away in ed to send each other email or bash out memos and patent applications that would be typeset for printing with troff.

I wonder how many of those people actually missed UNIX once they either left AT&T or AT&T abandoned UNIX. Did the ones who had their own microcomputers at home running CP/M or DOS or early Macintoshes miss the computing power they had on the job? Did they miss knowing that they didn't have to actually worry about keeping the computers running themselves because the sysadmins had it covered?

I think the problem with computing today is that the computer-literate people who have fuck you money have decided that GUIs are good enough for most people since most people would rather watch TV than read books. Computer-literate wage slaves (like us) mainly go along to get along because we know we're relatively pampered house slaves and don't want to jeopardize that position by speaking up lest we be seen as "difficult" or "not a good culture fit".

As a result we have this Morlock/Eloi division in computing. People like us, who understand how computers work and are comfortable with plain text and command-line interfaces, are Morlocks. The people who don't understand and mainly aren't interested in learning because they've been told they don't need to know, they've been told it's beyond them, or they've been told that knowing would turn them into unattractive geeks are Eloi.

Anybody who's read H. G. Wells or seen an adaptation of *The Time Machine* knows what Morlocks do to Eloi.

At risk of sounding paranoid, the powers that be are fine with the status quo. If the vast majority of people understood how computers actually worked, were comfortable with the command line and plain text, and realized that GUIs are frequently more trouble than they're worth it would crash entire industries.

Do you honestly think a computer-literate populace would tolerate adtech? Or most video games? Or an internet and social media platforms that are basically "television, but even shittier"?

By now, most might have understood how to script/automate/integrate otherwise disparate computational thingies for themselves.

I'd love to think this is the case, but what if most people make do with GUIs because they'd rather not deal with computers at all? Even I often find myself feeling like Dark Helmet when dealing with computers. "Out of order? Fuck. Even in the future nothing works!"

Instead, unless/until a GUI app has functionality buried in some ridiculous - not to mention ever *frustratingly* changing - menu hierarchy, people are at the mercy of waiting until one does, completely beholden to someone else making such kinda/sorta/maybe/not-really what they need.

This reminds me of a new app my wife told me about called NovelWriter.

It's implemented with Python and Qt so it runs on Windows, macOS, GNU/systemd, and OpenBSD. It tries to make writing novels easier, but after fifteen minutes spent kicking the tires I wasn't impressed because not only does it not do anything I can't do myself with a familiar text editor, subdirectories, actual Markdown files (rather than Markdown-like syntax), a makefile, and pandoc it has its own editor, imposes the developer's opinion of how a novel should be structured, and offers a limited set of export options that doesn't include DOCX, which is (unfortunately) the file format the New York publishing cartel expects.

In fairness, it's relatively straightforward to convert ODT (which NovelWriter does offer) to DOCX, but pandoc lets me convert Markdown directly to DOCX; I know this because this is how I created drafts for the publisher from Markdown sources when I published *Without Bloodshed* and *Silent Clarion*.

Even if I wasn't familiar with the command line and Unix dev tools from over 20 years of running GNU/Linux and OpenBSD at home, I think I'd still find using NovelWriter a frustrating experience because it's a halfassed Scrivener/Ulysses clone. If I wanted somebody else's idea of "easy" I could just make do with Word on Windows.