Programming environments should be designed to grow

Take a look at this intriguing presentation in which Iwan Baan talks about how people mold their environment.

When living in a world of standards, you might forget how distinctly creative humans can be in adapting the world to their context. I love this quote:

Now imagine what these already ingenious communities could create themselves, and how highly particular their solutions would be, if they were given the basic infrastructures that they could tap into.
Iwan Baan

Mr. Baan contrasts this approach with the standard "cookie-cutter housing solutions” that are inflicted upon massive amounts of people at the cost of being completely generic.

People grow and adapt their environment against all odds. Even in the physical world. This is a natural co-evolution phenomenon.

Then why do we push developers to live in standard programming environments? Developers are digital builders by definition. We need to take a radically different route and make our environments to match this ability. Developers should be enabled to build and adapt the environment the spend so much time in. The adaptation possibility should be deep and it should be at the core of the system. Some pillars should be provided, but everything else should be moldable.

Developers are not just builders. They are creators. And they are humans.

There's this plague of sameness which is killing the human joy.
Zita Cobb