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Considering that information technology seems likely to remain a part of our culture for the foreseeable future, I think we must be in it's infancy. Perhaps that attitude helps explain my reflexive eye-roll when coming across "modern" used to describe or contrast technology (especially software). Consider "User Experience", for example.

How much of the "digital user interfaces" that you regularly interact with do you hope/expect to have staying power over generations of users?

Thinking of the potential which seemingly must exist at the intersection of information and machine, I find it difficult to think of anything I've encountered that obviously has reached final form, particularly in terms of usability. Rather, (even) if I think of usability as (only) measured in "Ease of Use", I cannot begin to answer the question without specifying some information! ("Requirements, damn your eyes!" "We can't design software, much less UX in the abstract!").

If I take a step further, to demand usability be also measured in terms of "machine capabilities", I quickly step into a forest of semantics. (Note, I do not try to suggest "instead" rather than "also": a further step into quick-sand, surely.)

Let's put ourselves in a "business" context: at work, working with a team to design a solution to a problem. We're just going to add a disclosure to the home page. No sweat.

Meanwhile, as part of our commitment to on-going process modernization, the team is excited to "take the next step" with usability (no doubt persuaded by this epic essay rh). For the sake of argument we've SWAGed "exposure of all possible basic functionality of a machine (or system of machines, or machines and software, modulo people, etc)", and we're feeling that we might have got off the hook lightly in defining "machine capabilities" in one not-too-long breath. Off we go to groom some stories, confident there's a limit to how difficult we can make such a simple request look.

my problems go from domain and component (and feature and story) scoping (often spelled "Enterprise Architecture"), off into the wild jungles of semantics: exposure of a capability is one thing but if we step outside of that, given the machine can do "anything", and the user might well want to do "just anything", how do we even measure that except in terms of some problem domain? Moreover, if we take the philosophical position

are currently in the information technology is currently in the "VCR constantly blinking 12:00" phase of creating any UI likely to have sticking power over generations. Web UX (and it's derivatives, e.g. electron based stuff like Discord) such as right now feels like a step "forward" into the Microwave display era: enjoy your baked potatoe button.

  #+BEGIN_SRC perl
  say "Hello, org-babel!"
  #+END_SRC

(message "xyzzy")

  say "Hello, org-babel!"

  which env

/usr/bin/env

pscp -r d:/projects/bla/corwin.bru.st/public/* dh_aw28jd@corwin.bru.st:/home/dh_aw28jd/corwin-emacs