I am continually astonished at the ability of good programmers to defend lazy design, lousy design, and plain-old bad coding by saying that users of their software must "know" various and sundry things about their software before they can use it "correctly."
Good user interface is not that complex. It simply never leaves the user hanging, and it provides multiple levels of user access for multiple levels of expertise. Clueless users are the best thing that can happen to a solidly coded core package of software capabilities, because those users will force the designers to come face-to-face with all sorts of silly "insider group" assumptions that have little or nothing to do with the _real_ functionality of that software. Once programmers face up to the existence of pointless obscurities, they can place the solutions exactly where they belong -- in the software itself, where a computer can take care of them quickly and invisibly.
Clubhouses with secret passwords are great fun, but their also doggone silly. Software that could be made enormously more usable and available by a few simple user-oriented additions is even more silly, because it's more like encrusting a lovely diamond necklace with a finely sculpted layer of dried (or in some cases fresh) cow dung.
So I say bring on the clueless users... the ones who bang at the clubhouse door and things like "uh... _why_ exactly do I need to know that just to get it?" Then start building the ladders for these folks, so that they can see some of the amazingly good work stashed away up there.
And finaly: Free and open source types love to moan and groan about how The Establishment wants to keep software all to itself, and thus keep talented non-Establishment folks from doing the software development work they are able to do.
So... is it really any more ethical to create an Establishement of Cryptic Access that needlessly requires users to learn some suite of software idiosyncracies that should have been automated out of existence many years ago? Hmm?
Slashdot Mirror
I've seen the report. Surprisingly, it says a lot more positive things about OpenBSD than it does Linux. Linux shows up mostly in the data part.
I am continually astonished at the ability of good programmers to defend lazy design, lousy design, and plain-old bad coding by saying that users of their software must "know" various and sundry things about their software before they can use it "correctly."
Good user interface is not that complex. It simply never leaves the user hanging, and it provides multiple levels of user access for multiple levels of expertise. Clueless users are the best thing that can happen to a solidly coded core package of software capabilities, because those users will force the designers to come face-to-face with all sorts of silly "insider group" assumptions that have little or nothing to do with the _real_ functionality of that software. Once programmers face up to the existence of pointless obscurities, they can place the solutions exactly where they belong -- in the software itself, where a computer can take care of them quickly and invisibly.
Clubhouses with secret passwords are great fun, but their also doggone silly. Software that could be made enormously more usable and available by a few simple user-oriented additions is even more silly, because it's more like encrusting a lovely diamond necklace with a finely sculpted layer of dried (or in some cases fresh) cow dung.
So I say bring on the clueless users... the ones who bang at the clubhouse door and things like "uh... _why_ exactly do I need to know that just to get it?" Then start building the ladders for these folks, so that they can see some of the amazingly good work stashed away up there.
And finaly: Free and open source types love to moan and groan about how The Establishment wants to keep software all to itself, and thus keep talented non-Establishment folks from doing the software development work they are able to do.
So... is it really any more ethical to create an Establishement of Cryptic Access that needlessly requires users to learn some suite of software idiosyncracies that should have been automated out of existence many years ago? Hmm?
--Dactyl