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One of the most appealing features of today's software development systems is the possibility that users modify what they get. Web 2.0 - the users are the contributors. That this principle is so appealing is evident: it's successful, millions of users go for it.
From the user interface's point of view, it's one little link/button on the page, names "Edit This Page". This is revolutionary, just the revolution has not yet spread around. Today, internet users can (and do) change unstructured content, or customize predefined structures. Examples:
Wikipedia
In Wikipedia, clicking "edit this page" at the top leads to an simple text editor allowing to change the text content of the page. Certain interpretations of the text are used to apply structure. E.g. "==....==" creates a caption, which is automatically used in an generated index. While these basic techniques to apply structure are very easy to use, the strucutre of the overall content is simple. More structured information like tabular data is not supported (with exceptions like Taxo-Boxes). Originally well structure data is spread over different pages, just connected by all these great users keeping track. E.g.: knowledge about countries is spread over as many pages as countries exist, muliplied by the number of languages articles for these countries exist. There is no overall table maintaining this matrix. So, structured knowledge is not stored in a structured way. Still it's very interesting to see that knowledge in Wikipedia is well structured. Again the countries example: There are tables of countries. There are categories grouping countries by different criterias. There are even well structured information boxes used on all country pages, showing data in a common structure.
As software developers we can learn a lot from Wikipedia on how knowledge is structured if there are no software design patterns forcing the users (or the software developers) to follow certain structures.
MySpace
MySpace allows the user to create his own presentation as well as the own start page. It's possible to add or hide boxes with predefined content. Some of this content can be parameterized. So the user may handle structured data, but the structure is predifined by MySpace. There is no freedom in creating own structure, just to move within the given structure. At least: users start to create their own system. Still, we can learn a lot about what is the users expectation about how easy it should be to change the system accordingly to their wishes. And I heard users liking other systems like FaceBook more, because the user interface for designing the own pages is easier. Ease of use and flexibility of the user interface does matter!
The goal for a Holistic Programming System is: make changes to the structure, even to the software, as easy as clicking "Edit This Page". Consider, that our knowledge can be structured, and quite often is. There is sometimes even common sense of the structure to apply, but quite often there are different point of views about the structure of the knowledge, even if the pieces of knowledge are seen equally. So, a Holistic Programming System also needs to deal with different structures of same data.
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