Blague à part, il serait réducteur de résumer son travail à cette fonctionalité.
Bret Victor en parle ici (en 2012) :
...Larry made the elimination of modes his personal mission. That’s actually his words, and if you think he’s exaggerating, here’s Larry’s license plate for the last 30 years. (image of NOMODES license plate) Nowadays of course Larry has a website, at nomodes.com and he’s on twitter: @nomodes. And so like I said, Larry has done a lot of amazing work in his career but his self identity is clearly associated with this cause.
And so I’d like to ask: What exactly did Larry do? Like how could we best describe what Larry did? A typical biography might say Larry Tesler invented Cut, Copy, Paste. Which is true, but I think that’s really misleading, because this invention was very different than say, Thomas Edison inventing the phonograph. Edison basically just stumbled over the technology for audio recording and he built it out as a novelty. And he came up with this list of possible applications for his technology but he didn’t have any cultural intent. Whereas what Larry did was entirely a reaction to a particular cultural context.
So another thing that you might hear is that Larry Tesler solved the problem of modeless text manipulation. Solved the problem. And obviously that’s true, he worked on this problem for a long time, eventually solved it. But I think that’s really misleading too, because this problem that he solved only existed in his own head. Nobody else saw this as a problem. For everybody else modes were just how computers worked. There wasn’t anything wrong with them any more than we think there’s something wrong with having two arms. It just kind of was a fact of life.
So the first thing that Larry did was that he recognized a wrong that had been unacknowledged in the culture. And the thing is, that’s how many great social changes began as well.
(si vous ne connaissez pas Bret Victor, je vous conseille cette présentation ; c’est une bonne introduction de son travail.)
