We as a society have generally adopted computational environments that are not very good compared to alternatives such as GNU Emacs and other competitively sold software.
With personal computers, we started in a super-typewriter era and have now entered the user-interface era.
People did not measure the quality of a program by comparing it to a second program, but by comparing it to the typewriter, scissors and paste, or pencil and graph-paper spreadsheet they used previously.
Note that I am not suggesting that people pick the `best' among several user interfaces; there is so much investment in what has already been learned that it is hard to change radically. Instead, most people will migrate to a similar climate. No doubt, some will change radically -- this would be a good idea for a company that is trying to relearn its jobs from the ground up. Also, perhaps with 3D and voice recognition, radical migrations will occur; but I tend to doubt this. Most will stick fairly closely to the familiar.
The `new' interfaces will look a lot like the old, with similar metaphors of pre-computer offices or cities with libraries, banks, brokerages and the like.
(I am not happy with the name `User-interface era' -- can you think of a better one? I do like the name `super-typewriter' for the 1980s era.)
My expectation for the future is for several genres of user interface, not too different from what we have. Seems a realistic expectation. I am not sure I like it.
On the other hand, were I to find or create a next-generation interface that I like ....
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