Re: Capabilities vs. ACL and Cognitive Development Stages

Le 07/01/2014 17:09, Karp, Alan H a écrit :
> The prototypes that Marc Stiegler and I have built show that a UI for 
> a capability based system can go beyond a wizard in assisting the 
> user.  In our tools, the user takes actions in the UI to designate 
> what the user wants to do.  We map those designations to the 
> authorizations needed to complete the task without further 
> intervention by the user.
I've been thinking about something related to this work for some time 
now without really being able to put exact words on it. I'll try in this 
email, please forgive the roughness at times.

When I watched Drawing Dynamic Visualizations [1] by Bret Victor [2], 
the way he was manipulated the software he had written (especially at 
the end) reminded me of what you describe in the design of the Scoopfs UI.
His manipulations are minimalistic. His interactions (drag&drop, clicks, 
etc.) are only here for the sake of intent disambiguation (this is very 
clearly stated in the talk addedum [3]). In the vein of "not one click 
for security", he's doing "not one click more than necessary to get your 
job done" (aka "good design"?).

It all reminds me of how interactive theorem provers work. A theorem 
prover, among other things allow to prove properties of a program. The 
manual process is very tedious and labor intensive, so there are tools 
to assist making the proof. Some tools do all the job on their own (but 
are limited in what they can do), other tools are interactive and ask 
further info to a human being when they hit a limitation in what they 
can prove.
Watching someone interacting, I came to wonder if the human being was 
doing the proof or rather if it was a "temporary human-computer 
symbiosis" that was doing the proof.
The human has an initial question about the program provides some input 
(logical assertions), the computer provides an output (state of where 
the proof is left at) and a question, the human adds more input and so 
on. At some point, it's not clear if the human is really the one leading 
the process.

I wonder if it's not how all software should be designed. I lack a good 
reason to think this is a bad idea or that it introduces a fundamental 
flaw. Arguably, it's more effort in the software/domain/data modeling part.
Maybe devs are too busy trolling about AngularJS vs Ember.js or 
programming languages...

As a recommanded reading, I'd suggest Magic Ink by Bret Victor 
http://worrydream.com/MagicInk/
It's a long read, but a very good one in my opinion.

David

[1] http://vimeo.com/66085662
[2] http://worrydream.com/
[3] http://worrydream.com/DrawingDynamicVisualizationsTalkAddendum/

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