Final Cause in Telecommunications

Here's an amusing example of final cause. In 2014, in his e-mail signature, Richard Stallman objects to Skype because it's non-free (freedom denying!) software. He says "use a telephone call" instead.

--
Dr Richard Stallman
President, Free Software Foundation
51 Franklin St
Boston MA 02110
USA
www.fsf.org www.gnu.org
Skype: No way! That's nonfree (freedom-denying) software.
Use Ekiga or an ordinary phone call.

Then 29 years earlier, Edsger W. Dijkstra points out that Stallman is functionally illiterate.

Two comments to this question. One comment is that your view of industrial programs as pointed out in the question is narrow. There are all sorts of programs that hardly have users, if you think of a telephone exchange, or digital controls in cars or airplanes. As to the programming products that are used by people, I hardly have first hand experience, my impression is that an enormous amount of user time is wasted figuring out what the system does and how to control it, which is the consequence of two sorts of happenings. First of all that the designers have failed to keep the interface of a system as simple as possible—which is a challenge; but as soon as you realize that the main challenge of computer science is how not to get lost in the complexities of their own making, it is quite clear that this is a major task. Secondly, the scene is very much burdened by the fact that a large fraction of the people involved are functionally illiterate; particularly in the United States.

Now that's obvious to us now, but perhaps it wouldn't have been if Ed hadn't pointed it out so bluntly.

That's how the future reaches back to affect the past.