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Revive Raskin's 3 laws of software with humane work that considers a dev's duty of care

In 1942, Isaac Asimov formulated three laws of robotics. 58 years later, Jef Raskin responded with three laws of human-computer interface design. They haven’t been bettered yet. There are rules, and even laws, about designing computer user interfaces. Even after 35 years of Linux, which has brought Unix to the masses, the FOSS world has not yet really grasped this. In the meantime, the proprietary software world is busily forgetting everything it once knew. Sometimes these rules surface today, and the FOSS folks often get very cross when reminded that they’re user-interface scofflaws. Marcin Wichary’s recent blog post, They had no concept of a duty of care to their users, is an excellent recent example. (The Reg FOSS desk much admires Mr Wichary’s writing, to the extent that we bought his history of the keyboard, Shift Happens.) In his latest post, Wichary refers to CHERI Project boffin David Chisnall. …

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