Saw this on HN https://www.nngroup.com/articles/anti-mac-interface/ - seems to be originally from 1996 but updated in at least 2009. It makes a number of really good observations as well as some I disagree with.

The designers of the Phelps farm tractor in 1901 based their interface on a metaphor with the interface for the familiar horse: farmers used reins to control the tractor. The tractor was steered by pulling on the appropriate rein, both reins were loosened to go forward and pulled back to stop, and pulling back harder on the reins caused the tractor to back up [5]. It's clear in hindsight that this was a dead end, and automobiles have developed their own user interfaces without metaphors based on earlier technologies. Nonetheless, people today are designing information-retrieval interfaces based on metaphors with books, even though young folks spend more time flipping television channels and playing video games than they do turning the pages of books.

I think one of the genuine schisms in FoC work at the moment is whether you lean in to physicality of interactions or not. Bret Victor clearly believes that is the right direction (he's gone off the deep end a bit IMO with Dynamicland). Other people (like this article) point out the limitations of this approach. The General Magic UI with the virtual corridor is clearly nonsense, whereas Victor advocates very convincingly for physical corridors (workshops) you should move through. How come those aren't even more ridiculous? My initial thoughts are that Victor is right in that there is enormous value in anchoring HCI into the full facets of being human, and the more these align with our deep, long-evolved, senses, the more effective they will be. However, I also believe that human have the ability to fully and completely conceive of some "superpowers" that violate the laws of physics but still obey internal human brain logic. Things like teleportation, x-ray/omniscience, single-timeline time travel. A fully physical system like Dynamicland will struggle to implement things like sorting of files, even though this process introduces no conceptual difficulties. This quote from the article;

Metaphors not only constrain and mislead users, they can also limit designers' ability to invent more powerful interface mechanisms

I disagree with. For example, the file/folder metaphor does not constrain and mislead users, I think it empowers users because it allows them to make use of their intuitions. When you introduce "more powerful interface mechanism" such as symlinks/junction points, at that point you are actually constraining and misleading users, because you are removing the structural support of their intuitions, which ends up with users deleting files in one "place" and them disappearing from another "place" - a clear violation of natural laws. I think the crux of the disagreement is highlighted by this point;

The desktop metaphor assumes we save training time by taking advantage of the time that users have already invested in learning to operate the traditional office with its paper documents and filing cabinets. But the next generation of users will make their learning investments with computers, and it is counterproductive to give them interfaces based on awkward imitations of obsolete technologies

To what extent are these capabilities arbitrary familiarity with now-defunct technology, and to what extent are they absolutely intrinsic and unavoidable aspects of being human?

Two thoughts. (1) Dynamicland's deep end makes sense if you think of it as an attempt to escape the gravitational pull of our entrenched computing paradigms (2) Metaphors are meant to be broken. "It's like a flub except you dub instead gub."

I find screens vs not screens to be a useful distinction here. I think Dynamicland is trying to show us the way away from screens. Meanwhile for the large amount of work that will continue to be done on screens, things could be a lot better (and a lot of the work itself could probably be eliminated — bullshit jobs). As far as screens go I think Bret Victor’s arguments in Magic Ink are still very strong and not being taken seriously be UI designers. (In short that interaction is to be avoided because it’s faster to “navigate” with the eye)