creat 1228

Well, you don't HAVE to work that way. If you prefer to use the Windows or KDE paradigm of "everything (except for some peculiar reason your desktop) is a web page that WE will sort for you and display in canonical form whenever you look at it and you can't change the arrangement to anything other than the handful of sorting and display options that we designed" there are plenty of broken GUIs out there that will let you do just that. But I thought you didn't like broken GUIs. (And I seem somehow to have undertaken the arguably quixotic quest of convincing you, who has no access to one, that there do exist non-broken GUIs.)

Tell us about your proposed designs!

It's clearly been downhill all the way ever since Turing, Post, and Church started thinking abstractly about generalized information handling, not restricted to "computation" as such as it was then understood. Of course this happened some years before physical stored-program computers existed, so we've pretty much been skunked from the outset. If there's extra blame left over to go around, we can also point the finger at Shannon (who made the notion of information concrete by making it abstract) and McCarthy and the other early AI and symbolic-computing researchers and language designers who permanently set our feet on the path labeled, in large friendly lineprinter letters, "GIANT ELECTRONIC BRAINS -- THEY'RE NOT JUST FOR NUMBER CRUNCHING ANY MORE".

(Yes, I've deliberately and perversely misconstrued YOUR meaning and understanding of "to compute" in giving this answer. But my larger point is that the understanding of what it means to "compute" is by its very nature fluid, and has been inexorably broadened over the years.)

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