Steve Yegge, who spent 7 years working on distributed computing at Amazon, writes about a book called Purely Functional Data Structures. Yegge: “it’s abundantly clear that it’s time for us to move up to a higher level of abstraction. … Object-Oriented interfaces are failing us, and we need to turn today’s network into a computer that we can start programming directly, as if it’s a single machine. … Functional Programming is going to be a necessity in this new world. It’s a foregone conclusion.”

Another blog named Digital Digressions (nuts, and it looks like she used it first, too) points to a video demo of a touch screen with multiple contact points. This is the interface I want! Everything on the screen responds to touch. You can move things around, zoom or resize, stretch, pull, and “play” with objects on the screen using both hands. I think something like this will be a big part of future computer interfaces, perhaps combined with thin, flexible displays. I can’t wait.

Now I just need a more original name for my own site.