Amen!
I also like a good lite tool that hosts independent plugins, instead of
doing everything on its own...again...with its own set of bugs and
workarounds for the exact same thing. Light at the core, with a
personal set of plugins that together might be bloated, but that's the
plugins' problem and the user's problem, not the core. I think you've
nailed that with Non.
Keep up the good work, and...sigh...continue to defend it against the
folks who insist that it be a monolithic monster, because they'll
probably never go away.
To specifically comment on those people that demand a certain function
in a certain place: Not everyone even has a clue how software works, or
anything technical for that matter. I've worked with a few of those myself.
I was a FOH Engineer and System Architect, for example, basically
running the system that I built on a regular basis, and the leadership
would ask for way-too-specific things as if they had somehow understood
what was there and did a fair amount of engineering themselves on it.
Of course, that "understanding" was wrong and so, therefore, was the
engineering that they did. But because that was the first that they
were consciously aware of, that's what they insisted on. Sometimes I
could just ignore it, and they would eventually accept a "no", other
times I could do some "theatrical magic" and make the real system *look*
like it did what they wanted when it was really doing something else
that appeared similar on the surface (that they never looked past).
But I was always nervous about the "theatrical magic" approach because
it gave them a false data point that they could then use against me.
"You did 'X'! I saw it! Why can't you put 'Y' on top of it?! That
should be obvious!"
Actually, I didn't do "X". In fact, "X" was impossible and still is. I
only did something like looked like "X", and absolutely does not support
"Y" at all like I agree that "X" would have.
I've also seen the same thing in an industrial equipment company. The
investment firm that bought a private company, made those same mistakes,
and were bad enough at it that they created a revolving door of
engineers, who kept taking whatever tribal knowledge they had with them,
when the general market at the time said that they should have had
engineers lining up at the door to work anywhere. I left there myself,
close to my 1 year anniversary.
I don't think they ever realized how much they were actually costing
themselves by trying to do the engineers' job for them, and not
listening to a direct-expert's "No." Pretty soon, all of their
engineers didn't really know much (like me, still young), or had
questionable attitudes (claimed to plant a "code bomb" as he left - I
looked all over it and couldn't find one, but still...), and that's also
costly in ways that are inherently not obvious.
To further generalize it, I've seen this described as the X-Y Problem,
where the real solution is to backtrack a lot and take a completely
different path...except that some (a lot of?) people can't do that
because of the Sunk-Cost Fallacy:
https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/66377/what-is-the-xy-problem
For the Sunk-Cost bit, they've spent a lot of mental effort (at least)
on their pet solution, and so they can't let go of it, no matter how
ridiculous it seems to everyone else. A dead-end impossible project at
that industrial equipment company, for example, which all the engineers
and technicians knew, but a manager continued to waste company resources
(and marketing) on.
Your great advantage, Male, is that you don't answer to anyone but
yourself on this project. You can afford to blow those people away...as
long as you're okay with continuing to do it, over and over again. They
might wear you down if you pay too much attention to them, but they
can't do much more.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
*From:* John Rigg
*Sent:* Thursday, January 07, 2021 6:58AM
*To:* Non
*Subject:* Re: [non] The Parable of the Free Software Developer and the
Imposing Stranger
On Wed, Jan 06, 2021 at 10:15:32PM -0800, J. Liles wrote:
I feel like all of this should be self-evident.
It is self-evident to those willing to see it.
I've been recording music for a long time, on both hardware
and software. My mental model of how a recording system
works was formed in traditional analogue recording studios.
Non, with its modular design, fits that mental model better
than any monolithic DAW I've ever used.
I also do electronics tech work for commercial studios. It's
easy to spot the gear that was designed by someone who uses
it themselves. It tends to have a restricted number of
features, but they all work well. It also tends to be
reliable and easy to maintain.
Contrast that with gear designed by a marketing department.
It tends to have a lot of fancy features that can get in the
user's way. It's often unreliable and a nightmare to
maintain.
Software follows a similar pattern. Non is firmly in the
'designed by user' category. It's reliable and doesn't get
in my way with excessive handholding.
A lot of other audio software follows the 'designed by
marketers' pattern. That's fine if it's what you want, but
it becomes a problem if you try to force all software to be
like that. Nobody has the right to demand a feature that
goes against a developer's design philosophy.
John
