On Wed, Jun 16, 2010 at 12:02 AM, Connor Lane Smith <c...@lubutu.com> wrote: > Think of it more as how the user > interacts with the software, not on a graphical level but a > psychological one.
Are you listening to yourself? There's no 'psychological interaction' with computers, unless the user is profoundly insane. Computers are tools used to enable software tools. It's like a drill with interchangeable bits, and I have yet to see DeWalt advertise their new psychcologically-streamlined drill experience. > > The Unix philosophy, creating simple tools which can be easily > combined in new ways, isn't an engineering improvement, it's an > interactive one. It's about allowing the user to more efficiently use > their software. That's why we have stderr (hey old thread), why we > prefer fewer flags, and why "silence is golden". It's more about usage > than machinery. None of which has anything to do with "user experience" except in the sense that a hammer with a wooden handle offers a better "usage experience" than a handle made out of ice cream. > Talking of pastel, have you ever used Acme? You should read the paper > on it [1]. The "nuances and heuristics" section is all about is how > Pike tried to make the user interface simple and efficient. But- but- > that's a user interface for Plan 9 programmers! Could it be that we > too need well-designed user interaction? Somehow, after years in the suckless community, I did actually manage to notice acme. I've read the paper. I've installed it. It's a pile of unusable shit. I am not trying to insult Rob Pike, but Acme was a total failure. I agree that programmers need well-designed interaction, but the fact that you consider Acme's interface 'well-designed' indicates at best a lack of consensus in the matter. I'd certainly say Acme is 'well-designed' in the sense that a hamburger left on the grill for several hours is 'well-cooked.' > This may shock you, but we are mortal. Programmers cannot understand > the entire machine down to the last transistor, and computers are > becoming ever more complex. Maybe *you* can't. Lots of us can. Many of us pursue such understanding as a hobby. Some people make a living understanding it. "It's hard" is no excuse for crapping up software. > However, you are right about one thing: a lot of programmers don't > give a shit about "user experience". That's a huge shame. That sort of > thinking will get us closer to vi and emacs and further from acme and > sam. I think you've mixed up the sides in that match. vi and Sam lie on one end of that road, and Acme and Emacs are at the other end. > None of the editors I've mentioned are perfect (please no holy > war), but the latter two are designed to be simple both internally and > externally. (If only internal simplicity mattered we would have stuck > with ed.) I note you dismiss ed, probably because of its underdesigned "User Experience." I use ed more often in my work than vi and sam combined. Again, however, there's nothing 'simple' about Acme. If I need to read a seven-page paper with a page-long bibliography to use the editor, the editor can go fuck itself. I can get started in vi with 'i' and ':wq' -- so much for your carefully designed "User Experience" > I hope that someday more programmers will care about user experience. > I also hope that they realise programmers are users too, and aren't > perfect either. And I hope that programmers who feel the way you do stay where most of them are today: rewriting file managers for the fifteenth time in the Gnome and KDE projects. -- # Kurt H Maier