I really miss the thoughtfulness of human-computer interfaces of the 1980s and 1990s. Serious amounts of thought and in many cases actual research was put into designing computer interfaces to maximize productivity and (get this) minimize distraction.

The idea back then was that a computer existed to augment human intelligence, not to trap you in a dopamine loop Skinner box to maximize "engagement." In fact, the phrase "augmented human intelligence" was present in the actual name of the SRI research program that originally developed early GUIs, hypertext, and the mouse among other things.

GUIs are an area where I think computing has gone very significantly downhill.

Modern interfaces are superficially prettier than those old GUIs, but the majority of this superficial aesthetic improvement can be attributed not to UI improvement but to technological advancement. It's much easier to make things pretty when you have high-DPI 24-bit or 32-bit true color displays and absolutely massive (by old time standards) amounts of computer power and RAM to draw on them. The flat panel revolution also contributed a lot. Has anyone around here actually tried to use a CRT monitor recently? It's astounding that we ever used those things. Even a bad LCD is much better than the very best CRTs ever made.

If you ignore the superficial eye candy, many if not most modern GUIs are objectively worse on almost every metric.

They're inconsistent, disorganized, unintuitive, and often distracting. Sometimes distraction is the actual objective, such as with mobile apps trying to dominate your attention to "go viral" or anything touching social media. Every app invents its own UI metaphors and design, increasing cognitive load, and apps frequently change their UIs needlessly and force their users to re-learn everything. These last two things were explicit no-nos in old school guides to UI best practices. The goal was to decrease cognitive load and maximize productivity, not create an employment program for designers and coders.

The developer experience behind modern UIs is even worse than the user experience. Many of those old systems offered WYSIWYG GUI development environments that were a breeze to use and delivered fast maintainable low-bloat (you couldn't get away with bloat back then!) applications. Design your UI and then double-click on its elements and it would jump right to the code. Amazing!

We've ditched this in favor of the modern bloated web clusterfuck, XML-based eyesores like XAML, or manually coding UIs in programming languages element by element. The amount of work required to build a UI has multiplied, but the value delivered has stayed the same or actually decreased. Some of this would be forgivable if we got something for it, but we're still stuck in the paradigm of "code everything for every platform" vs "bloated ugly cross-platform GUI toolkits" (the latter includes Electron).

Other areas of programming have advanced, but GUIs are a neglected ghetto in spite of the fact that UIs are absolutely fundamental to the use of computers. It's hideous. If we'd kept the principles of thoughtful UI design while advancing the underlying technology we would have computers that are all a dream to both program and to use.