@lproven

I wish people in the F/OSS world would read more Raskin. The modern idea of an app as a silo is the antithesis of his ideal, but something that's directly derived from the silicon valley VC startup mentality requiring you to grow, which you can only do in a mature ecosystem at the expense of others. This requires you to build things that keep people in your world and out of others.

He did have some blindspots though. The article hints at this:

Raskin thus conceived of a unified workspace in which everything was stored, accessed through one single interface appearing to the user as a text editor editing one single massive document

Raskin was very text focused. As someone who likes text, it's easy for me to fall into this trap as well. On early computers, this was understandable, because text was about all that they could do, but it was a limitation.

ClarisWorks did some aspects of Raskin's philosophy somewhat better than he did. If you created a text box in the 'drawing' program, you got the behaviour of the word processor. If you created a table in the drawing or word processor program, you got the behaviour of the spreadsheet. Component models were popular at the time, but they ran up against both economic and security problems (insert long CHERI digression here).

Raskin's First Law (A computer many not harm a user's data, or through inaction allow a user's data to come to harm) was an underlying principle for the CoreObject system we built for Étoilé. Every change was automatically persisted. Undo was non-destructive and you could always revert to any previous state by exploring the tree of previous versions. You could also merge changes from previous branches. Revision control systems have a similar model, but rarely integrate with the UI's undo model, so end up with the kind of modality that Raskin hated.