Yeah definitely. I have for a long time felt really cynical about where software development has beeing going for years.

I know I am being a bit unfair but I think that we have built a lot of bloated stuff on top of principles which have been proven to work for quite some time now.

I think systems like NeXTStep, early MacOS X, Amiga OS, RISC-OS, BeOS etc showed lots of great ways of organizing and doing graphical user interfaces.

I don't think the last 20 years or so has really advanced the state of the art that much. Yeah our UIs look prettier and are more animated but I don't think they are fundamentally easier to use or more powerful per say.

Many of the older UI concepts seems to have been more powerful in many ways. I am thinking of the early Smalltalk machines where the whole OS UI level is a Smalltalk environment which you can quite freely modify and tailor to your need through a live Smalltalk environment.

Another powerful concept I think was demonstrated with Plan9 where every window was a file. I cannot remember all the specifics anymore but I remember reading some stuff Rob Pike wrote about what kind of powerful implications that had for software development.

There was a lot of these really strongly unified powerful ideas in older system which are kind of lost in todays systems which tend to be lots of different ideas bolted together without core principles underlying it all.

So I am hoping for AI being something which can revolutionize the way we interact with our software. True AI is likely far away still. But if you could have some kind of measure of a dialog with a computer so you could tell it in plain language what you want and it could respond by asking you to clarify what you mean then you could get somewhere.

So many "natural langauge" approaches has failed because natural language is ambigious. Us humans can make it work because we can have a dialog with a conversation back and forth to clarify things. I feel that part is missing from computer UI. A mode advanced AI could hopefully give us something like that.

Then UI advancement could be more than just animated smileys and buttons which no longer look like buttons.