ROBACUS OBSTACLES
ROBACUS' motto: "You can have anything,
except what you are familiar with",
has been the cause of the major obastacle
to its development. The motto means that
an experienced software programmer needs
to abandon many of his hard-earned
skills and trying to adapt to a strange and
often experimental new environment.
Furthermore, the "anything" in the motto
really means whatever is
absolutely best, which inevitably means
for all other users and to the forever
future. The user has to work almost
exclusively for the benefit of others,
trying hard to suppress his personal
preferences.
The adaptation to a new software
environment is the most difficult among
all difficult software work. When such
an environment is open-ended in that
it is designed to be permanently
developing, thus unstable, the
challenge can be truly overwhelming and
even offensive to traditional software
developers. As the environment is always
in a transient mode toward any kind of
better software approach, the
toughest experience for a developer to
swallow is the abandonment of his
painstakingly developed piece of work.
Fortunately, nature seems to be on ROBACUS'
side. First, the driving force behind
ROBACUS is its very concept rather than
the technology. This concept declares
what nature intended for technology:
to serve humanity and, therefore, should
be developed collective by all people.
This, however, is in contrast to the
today's (un)nature of technology -- used
for oppression of humanity and monopolied
by the powerful few.
The solution to this conflict between,
what nature intended and what the
current technological establishment, is
really a simple one. It only needs
greater-than-one person(s) to keep plugging
away and holding firm to the concept.
An guarranttee for eventual success of
ROBACUS in the natural scheme
of thing is the meteorical rise of the
power of the computer. We may not need
to wait too long before the critical mass
of software technology in ROBACUS is
reached such that the productivity from
software automation in ROBACUS
can not be contained
by the monopolizing forces of present
software industry.
ROBACUS, by then, will fit nicely into
the human experience.
